The emergence of workstation clusters: Should we continue to build mpps? [panel session]

Summary form only given, as follows. Workstation clusters with modern interconnection technologies (such as Myrinet, Fast Ethernet, ATM, Fibre Channel) have gained popularity as a platform for cost-effective parallel processing. As this trend continues to march ahead successfully, more and more architects, system designers, and application developers are migrating towards workstation clusters. This leads to the following questions for the parallel processing community. Will the demand for MPP systems continue to decline? Are there special classes of applications which will need MPP systems in spite of the availability of high-performance workstation clusters? Are there special QoS issues which will continue to keep the market alive for MPPs? Will the MPP systems become obsolete soon? Should we target our future research towards MPPs, Workstation Clusters, or both? At the conference the panelists provided their view points and debate on the above questions.