High Performance Computing: Technology, Methods and Applications

High Performance Computing is an integrated computing environment for solving large-scale computational demanding problems in science, engineering and business. Newly emerging areas of HPC applications include medical sciences, transportation, financial operations and advanced human-computer interface such as virtual reality. High performance computing includes computer hardware, software, algorithms, programming tools and environments, plus visualization. The book addresses several of these key components of high performance technology and contains descriptions of the state-of-the-art computer architectures, programming and software tools and innovative applications of parallel computers. In addition, the book includes papers on heterogeneous network-based computing systems and scalability of parallel systems. The reader will find information and data relative to the two main thrusts of high performance computing: the absolute computational performance and that of providing the most cost effective and affordable computing for science, industry and business. The book is recommended for technical as well as management oriented individuals.

Editorial Preface. General. Preface, about high performance computing and this book (J. Kowalik, L. Grandinetti). Heterogeneous network-based computing systems (J. Dongarra). Data communication and high performance computing (O.A. McBryan). Scalability of parallel systems: efficiency versus execution time (J. Kowalik). Architectural features affecting total scalability of parallel systems (J. Sobolewski). Hardware Systems. Trends in high-performance computer architecture (J.-L. Baer). The CONVEX Exemplar SPP1200 - a new scalable parallel system with a virtual shared memory architecture (F. Baetke). Hardware performance of the VPP500 parallel supercomputer (A. Nodomi et al.). The balance of power - a brief history of cray research hardware architectures (L. Davis). Designing a scalable parallel system: the IBM SP2 (T. Agerwala et al.). Programming and Software. An integrated environment for the support of automatic compilation (M. Pantano, H. Zima). The design and implementation of the reduction routines in ScaLAPACK (J. Choi et al.). Software tools for parallel computers and workstation clusters (W. Gentzsch). Mentat-applying the object-oriented paradigm to parallel processing (A. Grimshaw). Parallel loop scheduling for high performance computers (K.K. Yue, D.J. Lilja). The MPI message-passing interface standard: overview and status (W. Gropp, E. Lusk). Software engineering considerations in the construction of parallel programs (J. Schaeffer, D. Szafron). Applications. A role for high performance computing in surgery (C. Diegert). Parallel shortest paths methods for globally optimal trajectories (D.P. Bertsekas et al.). Financial applications and HPF (A. Joubert). Virtual reality and high performance computing (H. Sowizral). Collaborative computing (K. Sharma). Sparse block and cyclic data distributions for matrix computations (R. Asenjo et al.). Parallel image compression with JPEG for multimedia applications (G. Falkemeier, G. Joubert). High performance computational chemistry; NWChem and fully distributed parallel applications (M.F. Guest et al.).