A Survey on Parallel Architectures and Programming Models.

In addition to large-scale computers, multicore processors have taken a significant part in all kinds of devices, from personal computers to cell phones. Although programming techniques for parallel systems exist for a while, the development of applications that can appropriately utilize multicores is still challenging in many aspects, especially for full exploitation of the computational resources. Additionally, another challenge is the efficient and easy programming of heterogeneous systems for the complete exploitation of silicon resources. Solutions to making parallel programming more developer-friendly are various programming models that abstract parallelism and concurrency. Implementations of those models need to extend even to lower layers of software parallelism and hardware parallelism as well.This paper gives an overview of parallel architectures and trending programming models for such processing units and systems. It also presents challenges to scalability and portability in parallel systems and presents up to date trends in heterogeneous systems that heavily exploit parallelism.