Challenges for parallel computing

There has been an overwhelming trend in recent years to move towards parallel computing. Hardware manufacturers are increasing the amount of parallelism on a single chip in several ways, including adding more processing cores and accelerators to execute the same instructions on many data items simultaneously. At the other end of the spectrum, as commodity hardware prices fall, it is becoming increasingly affordable to build large-scale, multi-node distributed machines. Similarly, as processor speeds begin to stagnate, software developers will be forced to exploit the parallelism in their applications in order to continue to improve the performance.