The influence of VLSI technology on computer architecture
David L. May · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series A Mathematical and Physical Sciences · 1988
Abstract Very-large-scale integration (VLSI) offers new opportunities in computer architecture. The cost of a processor has been reduced to that of a few thousand bytes of memory, with the result that parallel computers can be constructed as easily and economically as their sequential predecessors. In particular, a parallel computer constructed by replication of a standard computing element is well suited to the mass-production economics of the technology. The emergence of the new parallel computers has stimulated the development of new programming languages and algorithms. One example is the Occam language which has been designed to enable applications to be expressed in a form suitable for execution on a variety of parallel architectures. Further developments in language and architecture will enable processing resources to be allocated and deallocated as freely as memory, giving rise to some hope that users of general-purpose parallel computers will be freed from the current need to design algorithms to suit specific architectures.