We'll be covering this material in lecture next week also, March 5. The variety of high performance computers available now motivates us to briefly examine some architecture points related to high performance computers. In the current world of computing, the user is accustomed to using an interface tool to optimize performance on a particular hardware platform. Luckily, time has passed. Computers have gotten faster and MUCH cheaper.
Memory is cheaper and therefore more plentiful.
Software tools such as compilers have advanced. The programmer has a reasonable expectation that when a solution has been developed and coded in Fortran or C, that same code will be transportable to other environments. This diagram indicates how the programmer is removed from directly working with the particular hardware currently available. This makes the programmer's code writing skills valuable and makes moving from one compute environment to another reasonably straight forward. The expertise a programmer would develop would not directly transfer to other environments.