Division Director Predicts the Necessity of Parallel Processing in Modeling and Simulation Applications

(April, 2007) - Richard Fujimoto, Director of the Computational Science and Engineering Division of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, recently delivered a keynote talk at a joint session of the ACM/SCS SpringSim 2007 conference and the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO) Simulation Interoperability Workshop (SIW) titled "Modeling, Simulation and Parallel Computation: The Future is Now"

"The computing industry has reached an inflection point," said Fujimoto in his abstract, "Exponential clock speed improvements that have driven computer system performance advances over the last several decades have reached a plateau ... successful exploitation of parallel processing will be critical to achieve sustained growth in computation power in the years ahead."

According to Fujimoto, these advances will be necessary to keep pace with the demand for modelling systems of continually increasing complexity and scale. Among the major hurdles remaining before parallel execution can become widely exploited, Fujimoto identified the need for scalable parallel simulation software, easy to use synchronization techniques, effective load balancing and resource allocation approaches, automated fault tolerance, and time shared use of computing platforms.

SpringSim 2007 and the SCS/SISO Joint Plenary Keynote were held at the San Diego Marriott Mission Valley on March 26, 2007.