New hardware and software technologies are emerging all the time, and there is a
never-ending issue of what choices should be used to support both legacy and
evolving applications and their algorithms. An example of one of these issues is
the use of multi-core processors. The producers of these processors seem to
think that a shared-memory model is adequate, but in reality, the HPC
market-place will want to use large systems of multi-core processors, where
there will be a need for intra and inter communication between the processors
and cores. This type of programming can be overcome using MPI/OpenMP/threads,
but in reality a programming paradigm that encompasses this type of architecture
is needed. Indeed, the way Intel, AMD, IBM Cell, and GPUs processors are
designed means that optimisation of code on these systems will take a lot of
time and effort. Another area that is changing rapidly is the move away from
Grid computing, towards Clouds and Virtualisation, which are innovative, but
potentially do not meet the needs of some HPC users. In addition, the need for
Green IT computing that optimises application performance and potentially saves
power is a very important aspect of computing in the future.