Technological developments happen rapidly in the industry of computing due to advancements in system software and hardware. Hardware advancements happen around processor advancements and their creation techniques, and high-performance processors are being generated at an amazingly affordable price. Hardware advancements are further boosted by network systems with high bandwidth and low latency. Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) as a concept has brought several phenomenal advancements in regard to producing commanding chronological and parallel processing computers. Simultaneously, system software advancements have improved the ability of an operating system, using advanced software programming development techniques. All of these advancements were observed in two commanding computing eras: the sequential and parallel era of computing. The following diagram shows the advancements in both the eras in the last few decades and also forecasts what would happen in the next two decades:

In each of these eras, it is observed that the hardware architecture growth is trailed by system software advancements; this means that as more powerful hardware evolved, advanced software programs and operating system capacities correspondingly doubled their strength. Better applications and problem-solving environments were added to systems with the advent of parallel computing; due to this, mini to microprocessor development and the concept of clustered computers emerged.

Now let's review some of the commanding parallel system architectures from the last few years.