A user´s perspective on the state of parallel processing

The author describes his experience with the development of large-scale, highly parallel applications hosted on a variety of parallel processing architectures. He suggests that researchers should not become so caught up in the search for general and consistent models and programming tools for parallel processing that they forsake the ability to tailor the processing resources of the system to the requirements of the problem, and vice versa. High-level abstractions that hide architectural details may obscure performance issues that are important to the algorithm design process. It is concluded that the parallel processing community does not need a single, uniform set of models, tools or paradigms to achieve success. All that is needed is the same sort of basic design and analysis tools that have served the sequential processing community for a number of years