Alternative Architectures for Computer System Performance Enhancement

Hasan Krad

Computer-based solutions for scientific applications require higher performance computer systems than ever. In fact, the improvement of the computer system performance through the improvement of the performance of hardware chips has almost reached its physical limitation and scientists started to seek the required enhancement of the system performance through new alternative approach to design computer systems using methods such as pipelining and parallel processing, with advanced processor architectures such as that of the Niagara family of processors that has been pioneered by Oracle®. In this paper, we will address some of these concepts and related issues and present a synopsis of some  important aspects of such architectures while emphasizing on the pipelining techniques that lead to the performance enhancement of such systems.