What is Parallel Computing?

The speed of single processor approaches to the non-quantum limit as the sizes of integrated circuit elements reduce to sub-micrometer scales. It has become clear over the last decade that parallel computing is and continue to be a major method with increasing importance to drastically expand our ability for execution of large-scale calculations with reasonable cost. In parallel computing, a large computation task is divided into many smaller jobs which are distributed to many processors for calculations. As the software systems and network technology for parallel computing mature, the dream of executing large-scale calculations and simulations with low-cost computer systems, such as the "Pile-of-PC" or Beowulf-class cluster, is taking place in real life!