The microprocessor for scientific computing in the year 2000

The future of scientific computing, like the future of all computing, demands higher and higher performance from the computing system. In the author's view, that means exploiting concurrency at all levels of granularity, including the microprocessor. For scientific computing there is much good news. For example, the regularity of scientific computations (although Amdahl's law makes it not as good as it might be) allows for multiple instruction streams operating on behalf of a single process. That works well for the multimicro paradigm, and in fact might further suggest putting the multiprocessor on a single chip. However, the author does not believe the single chip multiprocessor is the answer for high performance scientific computing in the year 2000 for two reasons: system partitioning and pin bandwidth. At the uniprocessor level, scientific code makes the job of the compiler and the job of the microarchitecture easier, and that will translate into greater performance sooner than will be possible with integer code. Instruction and data supply will both be handled jointly by the compiler and the microarchitecture.