Observations on universality and portability in high-performance computing

The universality of the hardware model and the portability of the software model are two central themes in high-performance computing, especially as parallelism and memory hierarchy force a gradual but irreversible departure from the classical, sequential paradigm of computing. This paper considers the possibility of formulating an analytical, quantitative approach to the study of universality and portability, offering a perspective on known results and indicating avenues for further investigation.