
271
Chapter 28
Parallel and
DistributedComputing
28.1 DAWN OF PARALLELISM
Parallel computing is a form of computation in which more than one
calculation can be concurrently carried out. A parallel computer is a com-
puter system with multiple processing elements, working in parallel, to
solve a problem. Before the middle of the 1950s, all commercial computers
were traditional serial computers.
IBM 704 was introduced in 1954. It was the rst mass-produced com-
puter with oating-point arithmetic hardware and could execute up to
4000 instructions per second. IBM 704 was a very successful commercial
computer. However, aer the middle of the 1950 ...