Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Computers have made their way into millions of households, businesses, and institutions all over the world. It's become very evident that society's dependance on these complex machines grows steadily as time goes by. Because society (just as technology) is ever changing, and in response to the new and old demands put on computers, a relatively new system of programming / processing has emerged in the cyberworld that utilizes multiple processors to complete a given task; this new system is called Parallel Computing.

Parallel computing is a valuable technique used for exploiting the combined power of hundreds to thousands of processors, available on PC clusters and supercomputers, for a single scientific simulation. Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a popular software infrastructure that allows parallel programming on a variety of computer hardware. The next generation of clusters and supercomputers will be designed using multiple processors on a single chip, which are known as Multi-core processors. A more recent parallel programming paradigm, known as Multi-threading, focuses on utilizing the power of Multi-core processors. MPI and Multi-threading programming have been shown to provide different benefits to applications in different environments