Technological Trends and their Impact on the Future of Supercomputers

Semiconductor technology is advancing at an amazing rate. The changes predicted for the coming 15 years will also have a profound impact on scientific computing. Two of the most important trends are a dramatically increased potential for parallel execution within a single chip, and a serious gap between the speed of memory and the processor. Future computer architectures will force the developers of scientific computing applications to address problems originating from fine grain parallelism and problems caused by the memory bottleneck.