Parallel computing and communication/network models - the "parallels"

Apologies for the pun, but one of my readings over the last week has been to read up on parallel computing in order to find some parallels between the opportunistic applications I have been working on (such as 7DS) and parallel computing.

Even though the two topics look different, there are actually several points in common.

Below is a list of topics, extracted from the textbook Parallel & Distributed Computing Handbook by Albert H. Zomaya, published by McGraw-Hill.

• PRAM (Parallel RAM) model; Methods for distributing and parallelizing algorithms
• Failures in parallel systems (Byzantine, other)
• Dataflow models
• Checkpointing (for recovery)
• Distributed software systems (this is similar to RMI)
• Data structures for parallel processing
• Shared memory, memory consistency

More details to come soon.