Massively parallel

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Massively parallel

Massively parallel is a description which appears in computer science, life science, medical diagnostics, and other fields.

A massively parallel computer is a distributed memory

Distributed memory

In computer science, distributed memory refers to a Multiprocessing in which each central processing unit has its own private Computer memory. Computational tasks can only operate on local data, and if remote data is required, the computational task must communicate with one or more remote processors....
computer system which consists of many individual nodes, each of which is essentially an independent computer in itself, and in turn consists of at least one processor, its own memory, and a link to the network that connects all the nodes together.

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Encyclopedia

Massively parallel is a description which appears in computer science, life science, medical diagnostics, and other fields.

A massively parallel computer is a distributed memory

Distributed memory

Message Passing Interface

Message Passing Interface is a specification for an API that allows many computers to communicate with one another. It is used in computer clusters and supercomputers....
. Nearly all supercomputer

Supercomputer

A supercomputer is a computer that is at the frontline of current processing capacity, particularly speed of calculation. Supercomputers introduced in the 1960s were designed primarily by Seymour Cray at Control Data Corporation , and led the market into the 1970s until Cray left to form his own company, Cray Research....
s as of 2005 are massively parallel, with the largest having several hundred thousand CPU

Central processing unit

A central processing unit is an electronic circuit that can execute computer programs. This broad definition can easily be applied to many early computers that existed long before the term "CPU" ever came into widespread usage....
s. The cumulative output of the many constituent CPUs can result in large total peak FLOPS (FLoating point Operations Per Second) numbers. The true amount of computation accomplished depends in the nature of the computational task and its implementation. Some problems are more intrinsically able to be separated into parallel computational tasks than others. When problems depend on sequential stages of computation, some processors must remain idle while waiting for the result of calculations from other processors, resulting in less efficient performance. The efficient implementation of computational tasks on parallel computers is an active area of research. See also Parallel computing

Parallel computing

Parallel computing is a form of computing in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously, operating on the principle that large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which are then solved Concurrency ....
.

Through advances in Moore's Law

Moore's Law

Moore's law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware. Since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958, the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased exponential growth, doubling approximately every two years....
, single chip

Integrated circuit

In electronics, an integrated circuit is a miniaturized electronic circuit that has been manufactured in the surface of a thin Wafer of semiconductor material....
implementations of massively parallel architectures are becoming cost effective. Examples include chips from Ambric

Ambric

Ambric, Inc., was a fabless semiconductor company founded in 2003 and based in Beaverton, Oregon, Oregon. Ambric produces Massively parallel processor array integrated circuit, for high-performance embedded systems and hardware acceleration of desktop computer and Server applications....
and picoChip

PicoChip

picoChip is a venture-backed fabless semiconductor company based in Bath, Somerset, founded in 2000.The company has developed a multi-core digital signal processor, the picoArray....
.

In life science and medical diagnostics, massively parallel chemical reactions are used to reduce the time and cost of an analysis or synthesis procedure, often to provide ultra-high throughput. For example, in ultra-high-throughput DNA sequencing as introduced in August 2005 there may be 500,000 sequencing-by-synthesis operations occurring in parallel.