What tools are needed?
We believe that tools for message-passing are getting better but are still at their infancy. We anticipate the both vendor provided and third-party tools like Totalview and Vampir will become more mature over time. HP is interested in working with partners to ensure that high-quality third-party tools complement HP's products and offer Hewlett-PAckard customers a broader set of tool choices.
What is the future of PVM/MPI?
is there a MPI-3,4, .../PVM 4.0, 5.0, ...
or
"the nice things about standards is that there a so many of them"
We believe that PVM codes will continue to exist, given the popularity of the system and its broad user community. Most of these codes are being deployed on networks of workstations. On the other hand, industrial codes running on multiprocessors will prefer MPI because all vendors have committed support to MPI. Partial MPI-2 implementations will start to appear in 1998, which will result in even broader acceptance of MPI.
What is you vision of the
programming environment 5 years from today?
We see a convergence of commercial and technical platforms, but still a clear need for explicit programming tools for parallelism. Parallel implementations of industrial codes are becoming available on a wide range of systems. These technical ISVs have chosen explicit parallelism in a majority of cases, which indicates that the trend will continue in the future. We will see the appearance of parallelism encapsulated in scientific libraries which will hide the complexity of parallel programming from the engineer and scientist. So, in five years, parallel programming will continue to be a difficult craft, to be used by a small community of experts and delivered in the form of parallel libraries and applications.