Petaops and Exaops: supercomputing on the Web

There are large-scale computation problems that could benefit from the power of the Web. The authors have chosen the year 2007 to set a hardware scenario where petaflops performance could be obtained by a variety of architectures, including an ATM-connected corporate intranet. They classify the kinds of parallelism found in different applications, arguing that the Web has advantages in the expression of general forms of parallelism that make it suitable as the software environment of choice for these applications on all hardware platforms. They conclude by analyzing Web software approaches in some detail, taking an inevitably nearer term perspective. Their purpose is to show how the Web and MPP can be advanced synergistically to solve different problems.