Publisher's Synopsis
The transition from serial to parallel computing in which many operations are performed simultaneously and at tremendous speed, marks a new era in computation. These original essays explore the emerging modalities and potential impact of this technological revolution.;Daniel Hillis, inventor of the superfast Connection Machine, provides an explanation of massively parallel computing. The essays that follow investigate the possibilities, as well as the constraints, that parallel computation holds for the future. These possibilities include its potential for simulating currently intractable physical processes and for solving "monster" scientific problems (involving new algorithms and ways of thinking about problem solving that will change the way we think about the world), and its use in the neural sciences (where the biological model for parallel computation is the brain). Essays also address the gap between the promise of this new technology and our current educational system and look at America's technological agenda for the 1990s.
