This paper is a survey of parallel computing that happens to be getting a lot of attention on the web right now. On the whole, it is an interesting read for anyone curious about computer architecture. I don't agree with everything in the paper, but I did learn a few things, and it does give me some hope that we will be able to work with the very parallel architectures we will be seeing soon. My favourite part: They present a really good, really simple argument for why it might be good to have asymmetrical architectures with one big, complicated, fast CPU for sequential code, and a whole lot of smaller, simpler CPUs for parallel code. Tim Bray's opinions about this paper are interesting, as are some of the comments on that page.
K. Asanovic et al. The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View from Berkeley. Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2006-183, University of California, Berkeley, USA, December 18 2006.