Advances in computing, and their impact on scientific computing.

This paper begins by discussing the developments and trends in computer hardware, starting with the basic components (microprocessors, memory, disks, system interconnect, networking and visualization) before looking at complete systems (death of vector supercomputing, slow demise of large shared-memory systems, rapid growth in very large clusters of PCs). It then considers the software side, the relative maturity of shared-memory (OpenMP) and distributed-memory (MPI) programming environments, and new developments in 'grid computing'. Finally, it touches on the increasing importance of software packages in scientific computing, and the increased importance and difficulty of introducing good software engineering practices into very large academic software development projects.