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Personal computers are today's most widely used technology. They can be found in almost any company, office, university and school. Those PCs are usually connected to local area networks (LANs). Due to the high performance of modern off-the-shelf microprocessors, PCs can reach the processing power of workstations. However, even when using state-of-the-art software packages, most of a PCs processing power still remains unused. In particular, most PCs are unused during off-work hours. During the last few years, a number of research projects aimed at utilizing networked workstations as parallel computing systems. Standard communication libraries were ported to workstations, low-communication algorithms were developed, and various parallel programming tools were ported to workstation clusters. These activities utilized workstation clusters as an alternative to expensive parallel computers for a wide variety of application domains. The WINPAR project aims at transfering selected concepts and technologies with high quality and proven usability from parallel computers and workstation clusters to PC networks. The project's visions are to operate networked PCs as parallel computers, and to make parallel computing available for the PC mass market. |
