Increasing Complexity Wilson pointed to the complexity of current theoretical problems as another reason to build more powerful computers. But real problems range to thousands or millions of electrons. He said that computing costs increase by a factor of 32 for each doubling of the number of electrons in the model. Processor speed and storage density can continue to increase as a linear function for the next decade without any scientific break-throughs, he said, although parallel processing will be necessary. But parallel processing introduces new problems.
Some people are very depressed.
The challenge, Erisman said, is to make the new machines so easy to use that scientists and engineers won't have to take up programming as a second career. Programs that run on a parallel processing computer must be written in sections. That is a reasonable task on machines having 16 processors, but machines of the future will have thousands. You'll have to rewrite the program, but you'll get a lot of help. He cited efforts of Alex Nicolau at Cornell and David Cook at the University of Illinois to develop software that will convert existing programs to run on parallel machines.