Six years ago Oxford Parallel was established as a unit within the Computing Laboratory to promote the use of parallel computing within industry and commerce through research and the development of software. Its Director, Prof. W. McColl, has developed a simpler approach to parallel programming called BSP, offering portable predictable high performance. Apart from general parallel algorithm development, two major areas for interaction between the scientific groups and the Computing Laboratory are in parallel visualisation and in manipulation of large databases so as to minimise the requirements for local memory and high bandwidth network links.
Visualisation is a critical component of high performance computing.