Archived: 27 April 1997
Published in Proc. of the Fourth Workshop of Integrated Data Environments Australia (IDEA), Magnetic Island, 17-20 May 1997.
Perceptions in the High Performance Computing community of what HPC is really about have changed considerably in the last decade, with the emphasis having moved somewhat away from fast processing towards fast communications and distributed computing. What used to be referred to as ``Supercomputing'' became ``High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC)'' in the USA and ``High Performnce Computing and Networking (HPCN)'' in Europe. The emphasis is now moving towards ``Distributed Computing'' and parallel computing groups worldwide are re-inventing themselves as distributed computing groups and centres. High performance storage is being recognized as a possible next hurdle as storage device speeds are no longer in balance with processing and communications speeds. A possible new acronym for the collective field is ``Distributed, High Performance, Computing, Commmunications and Storage (DHPCCS)''. It may be interesting to examine this refocus of direction and consider some trends in development of the hardware and software and in particular examine the applications areas that will need ``DHPCCS'' systems.