From a practical point of view, massively parallel data processing is a vital step to further innovation in all areas where large amounts of data must be processed in parallel or in a distributed manner, e.g. fluid dynamics, meteorology, seismics, molecular engineering, image processing, parallel data base processing. MPP technology can make the speed of computation higher and substantially reduce the computational costs. However, to achieve these features, the MPP software has to be developed further to create user-friendly programming systems and to become transparent for present-day computer software.
Application of novel electro-optic components and devices is continuing and will be a key for much more general and powerful architectures. Vanishing of communication hardware limitations will result in the elimination of programming bottlenecks in parallel data processing. Standardization of the functional characteristics of a programming model of massively parallel computers will become established. Then efficient programming environments can be developed. The result will be a widespread use of massively parallel processing systems in many areas of application.