A researcher at the University of Maryland’s engineering school has created a prototype of a parallel processor that could represent a way around the speed barriers that conventional serial processors have recently hit. Uzi Vishkin claims his net of 64 processors cranking away at 75Mhz individually is capable of computing speeds 100 times faster than current desktops.
Parallel processing is a way of breaking down a task so that many processors can work on it simultaneously. Although it has been in use in supercomputers for years, writing programs to control such an unwieldy piece of hardware has never been practical, and the flexibility of such computers was severely limited. Vishkin says he has developed algorithms that make his license-plate-sized bank of processors easy to program for.
