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The Future of Parallel Computation

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Parallel Computing

Abstract

As any other scientific discipline, computing science is undergoing a continuous process of transformations and innovations driven by theoretical research and technological advancements. Inspired by physical and biological phenomena occurring in nature, new computational models are proposed, with the potential to greatly increase the efficiency of computational processes. Another direction of development pertains to the characteristics of the problems tackled by computing science. With the increasingly ubiquitous and pervasive nature of computers in the modern society, the class of problems and applications computing science has to address is continuously expanding.

The importance played by parallelism in each of these two major development trends confirms the fundamental role parallel processing continues to occupy in the theory of computing. The idea of massive parallelism permeates virtually all unconventional models of computation proposed to date and this is shown here through examples such as DNA computing, quantum computing or reaction–diffusion computers. Even a model that is mainly of theoretical interest, like the accelerating machine, can be thought of as deriving its power from doubling the number of processing units (operating in parallel) at each step.

The scope of computing science has expanded enormously from its modest boundaries formulated at the inception of the field and many of the unconventional problems we encounter today in this area are inherently parallel.We illustrate this by presenting five examples of tasks in quantum information processing that can only be carried out successfully through a parallel approach. It is one more testimony to the fact that parallelism is universally applicable and that the future of computing cannot be conceived without parallel processing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

    Selim G. Akl & Marius Nagy

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  1. Selim G. Akl
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  2. Marius Nagy
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Correspondence to Selim G. Akl .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. Communication Systems, Jožef Stefan Institute, Jamova 39, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

    Roman Trobec

  2. Department of Computer Sciences, University of Salzburg, Jakob–Haringer Str. 2, 5020 Salzburg, Austria

    Marián Vajteršic  & Peter Zinterhof  & 

  3. Mathematical Institute Department of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Dúbravská 9, 840 00 Bratislava, Slovakia

    Marián Vajteršic

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Akl, S.G., Nagy, M. (2009). The Future of Parallel Computation. In: Trobec, R., Vajteršic, M., Zinterhof, P. (eds) Parallel Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-409-6_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-409-6_15

  • Publisher Name: Springer, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-84882-408-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-84882-409-6

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