Invited Talk 1- Past, Present, and Future Communicating Processors

Multiprocessor chips are here - and over the next decade they will scale to hundreds of communicating processors per chip. They offer the possibility of computer systems scaling to millions of processors. But perhaps more important is that they will make it possible to design electronic systems using concurrent software to program high-volume multiprocessor chips. Individual processors in these systems will be used to execute conventional software, or to emulate functions normally performed by hardware. And communicating processors - programmed in terms of communicating processes - provide a natural way to unify approaches to hardware and software design.