A distributed programming model and its applications to computation intensive problems for heterogeneous environments

Recent advances in high performance computing architectures have presented a clear trend that future systems must include computers from different classes. It is conceivable that effective large scale computing in general must be done in a heterogeneous distributed environment. The reported research seeks to build a generic virtual processor model on top of heterogeneous computing and communication devices. By using a specification based approach, we can effectively customize the available heterogeneous devices for every computer application. In this paper, we shall present the computational results of three field applications in scientific visualization, engineering simulation, and financial simulation using a Scatter‐And‐Gather method (or virtual vector processing). To aid objective evaluation of the virtual processor model, we also include the program re‐engineering costs for achieving such performances.