I know a little bit about the technology you mentioned in this blog entry, since I completed my PhD at Maryland just last year and had some interactions with Uzi Vishkin while I was there.

Uzi is a big proponent of the PRAM parallel programming model. He has been working for years on a parallel hardware architecture that can efficiently run programs written using a PRAM-like programming model, he calls his architecture XMT (“explicit multi-threading”). His group has also developed a compiler for a language they call XMT-C which is basically C with some simple extensions to support PRAM.

I’m not an HPC expert (I’m a software engineering person who studies HPC people), but my understanding is that everybody agrees PRAM is a much easier parallel programming model than existing models (e.g. message-passing, multithreaded), but it has never been feasible to build a system that supports a PRAM programming model and still achieves decent performance.

From the press release, it sounds like he has a working prototype of such a system now.