Analysis and design of parallel algorithms

The present state of electronic technology is such that factors affecting computation speed have almost been minimised; switching for instance is almost instantaneous. Electronic components are so good, in fact, that the time taken for a logic signal to travel between two points is now a significant factor of instruction times. Clearly, with the actual physical size of components being very small and the high circuit density, there is little scope for improving computation speech significantly by such means as even denser circuitry or still faster electronic components. Thus, development of faster computers will require a new approach that depends on the imaginative use of existing knowledge. One such approach is to increase computation speed through parallelism. Obviously, a parallel computer with p identical processors is potentially p times as fast as a single computer, although this limit can rarely be achieved.