Advances in massively parallel computing

Highly parallel systems play a central role in the future of computing. This role is increasing rapidly as the costs involved in improving semiconductor circuit speed and density become higher. The two major hurdles that prevent massive parallelism from becoming mainstream are the relatively slow progress of interconnection networks compared to that of uniprocessor technology and the immature status of parallel software. The paper gives a brief summary of some of the recent advances in the field of highly parallel computing, with an emphasis on message routing architectures