Universal mechanisms for concurrency . So it is tempting to predict that performance limits for single processors are near. However, optical processors could provide another large jump in computational performance within a few decades, and applications of quantum effects to processors may provide another large jump over a longer time period. Even if single processor speed improvements continue on their recent historical trend, parallel computation 124 . Skillicorn and D. Talia ACM Computing Surveys, Vol.
Portability is therefore a much more serious issue in parallel programming than in sequential.
Transferring a software system from one parallel architecture to another may require an amount of work up to and including rebuilding the software completely. For fundamental reasons, there is unlikely ever to be one best architecture family, independent of technological changes. Universal mechanisms for concurrency . The Actor model promotes scalable computing via the use of suitable programming abstractions. Group abstractions allow us to simplify computation and enhance performance in applications where there is uniformity of behavior among a group of actors.