From: nmm1@cus.cam.ac.uk (Nick Maclaren) Newsgroups: comp.parallel Subject: Re: The Future of Massively Parallel Machines, SIMD or MIMD approach? Date: 20 Dec 1998 06:44:41 GMT Organization: University of Cambridge, England Approved: bigrigg@cs.cmu.edu Message-Id: <75i6cp$hj0$1@encore.ece.cmu.edu> Originator: bigrigg@ece.cmu.edu In article <74t193$kge$1@encore.ece.cmu.edu>, hsh2@cov.ac.uk wrote: >I know MIMD and SIMD are broad classifications, but would anyone like to >comment? Examples would be useful. SIMD is dead, but is kept twitching by life support from NSA, GCHQ etc. Pretty well all forms of SIMD except vector systems died some years back, unless you include non-scalable kludges like MMX. The question nowadays is shared-memory MIMD versus distributed memory MIMD, and it appears that the former will rule the roost for the next 5 years except at the very top end. The main non-cost issue is usability (by naive programmers) and NOT utilitisation - if the latter were the case, we would have abandoned C, C++ and even Fortran in favour of much higher-level and more tightly defined languages. Beyond 5 years from now, anything might happen. Regards, Nick Maclaren, University of Cambridge Computing Service, New Museums Site, Pembroke Street, Cambridge CB2 3QG, England. Email: nmm1@cam.ac.uk Tel.: +44 1223 334761 Fax: +44 1223 334679 -- Articles to bigrigg+parallel@cs.cmu.edu (Admin: bigrigg@cs.cmu.edu) Archive: http://www.hensa.ac.uk/parallel/internet/usenet/comp.parallel