Advances in high performance computing and their impact on smart cities

Abstract

In the past thirty years, advances in high performance computing have increased the performance by million times, and decreased the volume of the machine by similar order. Accordingly, the fastest computer in the world increased its performance from one Gigaflop/s in mid-1980s to a projected one Exaflop/s by 2020. In addition, current hand-held devices such as smartphones have performance that rivals those machines of the 1980s. Due to hardware limitations, parallel computing became an integral part of our lives that it is hard to imagine a device that is not using multiprocessor power, including smartphones. What started as a hardware solution to physical limitation, prompted software engineers to adopt to parallelism, which also motivates the theoretical solution to algorithms design and analysis to provide a solution that is parallel oriented rather than a serial oriented one.