DOI: 10.36347/sjet

Pages: 218-225

Parallel and distributed computing is a complex and fast evolving research area. In its short 50-year history, the mainstream parallel computer architecture has evolved from Single Instruction Multiple Data stream (SIMD) to Multiple Instructions Multiple Data stream (MIMD), and further to loosely coupled computer cluster; now it is about to enter the Computational Grid era. The algorithm research has also changed accordingly over the years. However, the basic principles of parallel computing, such as inter-process and inter-processor communication schemes, parallelism methods and performance model, remain the same. In this paper, a short introduction of parallel and distributed computing will be given, which will cover the definition, motivation, various types of models for abstraction, and recent trend in mainstream parallel computing.