Perspectives on parallel software development

Summary form only given. In the last decade or so, the parallel supercomputer industry has grown to the point where quite a variety of product offerings exist. One characteristic of the development of parallel computing technology has been a proliferation of architecture concepts, without concomitant developments in software. A major issue for many potential users of parallel supercomputers is support for porting of existing software to the parallel computer and development of new software, as well as availability of standard libraries and third party application packages. Porting and development of software is complicated by the fact that not only are the architectures and programming models of the various parallel computers different from each other, but they are also quite different in many respects from the traditional architectures and programming models on which most existing software was built