Superconcurrency: A Form of Distributed Heterogeneous Supercomputing

Some of the complex issues of future supercomputing are discussed in the Richard Hill and John Gustafson papers published in the June 1990 issue of SUPERCOMPUTING REVIEW. Both papers contemplate the role of parallel processors in future operational environments. It is a variation of Gustafson's suggested approach, heterogeneous parallelism, that we will explore here, in particular Distributed Heterogeneous Supercomputing (DHS). DHS is the use of a heterogeneous suite of diverse processors, e.g., a mix of vector and parallel computers. DHS is not simply a LAN or a WAN because it aims to exploit the heterogeneous nature of the suite for reasons such as access to different data bases, access to remote special processors, or super-speed performance. Performance is the key to the Superconcurrency (Super-C) form of DHS, because Super-C tunes the selections of the different processors and optimally distributes the work primarily for maximum performance on the problem at hand (and only secondarily for load balancing).