High performance computing on networks of workstations through the exploitation of function parallelism

Network of workstations (NOW) has become a widely accepted form of high-performance parallel computing. As in conventional multicomputers, parallel programs running on such a platform are often written in an SPMD form to exploit data parallelism. Each workstation in a NOW is treated similarly to a processing element in a multicomputer system. However, workstations are far more powerful and flexible than the processing elements in conventional multicomputers. In this paper, we discuss how workstations in a NOW can be used to exploit more parallelism in an SPMD program, especially those induced from concurrent activities.