Talk:Massively parallel

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Massively parallel computing article without a single mention of The Connection Machine, nice... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.167.48.70 (talk) 05:20, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Maspar nCube  VP2200 T3D ? All history now. Maspar would be good for BitCoin mining. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.213.60.131 (talk) 23:54, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

More specific definitions
The definition at the start of article that "massively parallel refers to the use of a large number of processors (or separate computers) to perform a set of coordinated computations in parallel (simultaneously)" is good. But the article does not warn that sometimes people have used the term MPP with various more specific definitions.


 * "As Bell and Gray make clear, the term MPP, although used pervasively throughout the history of the Top500 list, is confusing, misleading, and provides little specification of system type. The notion of it has been abused, confused, and ironically derived from a different type of system than that to which it is ordinarily applied. (The original MPP was an SIMD-class computer, which is a separate classification of the Top500 list.)" [page 55] "MPP ... could mean a distributed-memory system, a large shared-memory system with or without cache coherence, a large vector system, and so on: it covers too many categories and hides too many salient differences to be a useful tool for description. On this point, we have come to agree with Bell and Gray." [page 57] Jack Dongarra et al, "High-performance computing: clusters, constellations, MPPs, and future directions", Computing in Science and Engineering, 7(2), 2005, 51-59.


 * "Clusters with over 1000 processors were called massively parallel processors or MPPs." [page 92] Gordon Bell and Jim Gray, "What’s next in High-Performance Computing", Comm. ACM, 45(2), 2002, 91–95.


 * Wikipedia at parallel computing says "MPPs have many of the same characteristics as clusters, but MPPs have specialized interconnect networks (whereas clusters use commodity hardware for networking)." And a Stack Overflow comment at What is the different between a Cluster and MPP supercomputer architecture agrees with this.


 * According to TOP500, and as noted in this article, "MPP architectures are the second most common supercomputer implementations after clusters." But it is not clear what definitions they use: the definition of MPP cannot be just "a large number of processors" because all modern supercomputers satisfy that definition.

JonH (talk) 13:22, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

Biased toward conventional CPUs
The article speaks of "large numbers of processors," strongly implying that each processor is a conventional, general-purpose CPU that fetches instructions from a stored program, and executes them. But depending on the application, the "processors" could be functional units that are smaller, more abundant, and more specialized than full-on, general-purpose CPUs. 75.149.30.179 (talk) 15:14, 20 February 2019 (UTC)