  The recent woes of the supercomputer industry and changes in federal funding
have caused some scientists to re-evaluate the means by which they hope to
solve Grand Challenge problems. I evaluate the potential of Massively Parallel
Processors (MPP) within this context and the state of today's MPP. I stress
that for solving large-scale problems MPP are crucial and that it is essential
to seek a balance between CPU performance, memory access time, inter-node
communications, and I/O. To achieve this it is important to preserve certain
characteristics of the hardware while selecting the hottest processor to design
the machine around. I emphasize that for long term stability and growth of
parallel computing priority should be given to standardizing software so that
the same code can run on different platforms and on machines ranging from
clusters of workstations to MPP.
