Why MPPs?

Abstract

Mainframes are expensive. Workstations are cheap. PCs are cheaper. Conclusion: All computing should be done on PCs (or, at a pinch, workstations). This is, of course, a naive conclusion. Even ignoring the Grand Challenges and other problems that demand high performance, there are many other reasons why this conclusion is questionable, and more particularly why the implicit corollary that all computing is distributed (because that’s where the PCs and workstations are) is also wrong. The most important of these are data security, data visibility, performance, and use.