The Past, Present and Future of High Performance Computing

Abstract

In this overview paper we start by looking at the birth of what is called
``High Performance Computing'' today. It all began over 30 years ago
when the Cray 1 and CDC Cyber 205 ``supercomputers'' were introduced.
This had a huge impact on scientific computing. A very turbulent time at both 
the hardware and software level was to follow. Eventually the situation 
stabilized, but not for long.

Today, there are two different trends in hardware architectures
and have created a bifurcation in the market. On one hand the GPGPU quickly 
found a place in the marketplace, but is still the domain of the expert. In 
contrast to this, multicore processors make hardware parallelism available
to the masses. Each have their own set of issues to deal with.

In the last section we make an attempt to look into the future, but this is
of course a highly personal opinion.