文档介绍：In this chapter:
• Why Worry About
Performance?
• Scope of High
Performance
Computing
• Studying High
Performance
Computing
• Measuring What Is
Performance
• The Next Step High Performance
Computing?
Why Worry About Performance?
Over the last decade, the definition of what is called high puting has
changed dramatically. In 1988, an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal titled
"Attack of the Killer Micros" that described puting systems made up of
many small inexpensive processors would soon make large puters
obsolete. At that time, a "puter" costing $3000 could perform
million floating-point operations per second, a "workstation" costing $20,000 could
perform 3 million floating-point operations, and a puter costing $3 million
could perform 100 million floating-point operations per second. Therefore, why
couldn't we simply connect 400 puters together to achieve the same
performance of a puter for $ million?
This vision e true in some ways, but not in the way the original proponents
of the "killer micro" theory envisioned. Instead, the microprocessor performance has
relentlessly gained on the puter performance. This has occurred for two
reasons. First, there was much more technology "headroom" for improving
performance in the puter area, whereas the puters of the late
1980s were pushing the performance envelope. Also, once the puter
companies broke through some technical barrier, the panies
could quickly adopt the essful elements of the puter designs a few
short years later. The second and perhaps more important factor was the
emergence of a thriving personal and puter market with
ever-increasing performance demands. Computer usage such as 3D graphics,
graphical user interfaces, multimedia, and games were the driving factors in this
market. With such a large market, available research dollars poured into developing
inexpensive high performance processors for the home mar