High Performance Computing: Trends and Expectations

In this paper we try to identify trends and to forecast expectations in the field of High Performance Computing (HPC). Since trends can only be recognized by observing historical data, this paper contains quite some information on past and current developments in HPC. Using these data, we try to give some insight in to-be-expected hardware and software. All aspects that together constitute HPC will be discussed: processors, memory, architectures, parallelism, message-passing, cache coherency, compilers, etc. Also developments in the area of Computational Fluid Dynamics will be touched upon, in relation to HPC.