In computing, von Neumann syndrome or supercomputing crisis is the phenomena that, for most applications in massively parallel computing systems with thousands or tens of thousands of processors, the performance can be far less than hoped. Prof. C. V. Ramamoorthy noted that it is believed to be due to two factors. Firstly there is a hardware barrier in the efficiency in moving data, called the memory wall or von Neumann bottleneck. Secondly there is a a fall in programmer productivity when faced with systems that are massively parallel, the difficulties in developing for parallelism (or thread-level parallelism in multi-core CPUs) when previously this was not an issue. The reconfigurable computing paradox is that the use of reconfigurable computing on FPGAs produces faster results despite a lower speed, where, instead of moving data around, the locality of execution is optimized by placement and routing. This is also called a data-stream-driven anti machine paradigm. The term Von neumann syndrome was coined by Ramamoorthy and it is named after John von Neumann's model of computer architecture.
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