CRPC Book Details the Promise and Practice of Parallel Computing |
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More than 30 researchers across the country, most from CRPC sites and affiliated sites, are collaborating on a book that will give students and practitioners of technical computing an understanding of both the promise and practice of high-performance and parallel computing. Slated for release in 2000, the CRPC Parallel Computing Handbook and its associated Web site will be a resource for computer science and application researchers, as well as for computational science and parallel computing education and training.
The book will be suitable for people who have a good background in applications or computational science, with the principal goal of making it easy for them to understand the parallel computing technologies available and how to apply them. Readers will include users of high-performance systems whose architectures span the range of small desktop SMPs and PC clusters to supercomputers costing $100,000 or more. The CRPC Parallel Computing Handbook will focus on software technologies and the large-scale applications enabled by them. Each area contains a general discussion of the state of the field, followed by detailed descriptions of key technologies or methods. The book is organized in the following four sections: * Parallelism * Applications * Software Technologies * Conclusion: Wrap-up and Futures The Parallelism section includes an overview that will emphasize motivating applications and driving forces to the field of parallel computation, such as the Internet and High-Performance Computing Communication (HPCC) Presidential Initiatives. Parallel computing architectures and parallel programming considerations will be summarized. The applications section is designed to help new users learn if and how high-performance techniques can be applied in their areas. More than 25 vignettes are included that describe parallel systems in different areas and recommend successful approaches. These include such diverse areas as the study of black holes, earthquakes, climate, plasma physics, financial modeling, scheduling, materials, combustion, transportation modeling, signal processing, computational biology, and energy and the environment. The software technologies section will discuss the progress made in various systems, many developed by the CRPC. These include message-passing libraries, parallel I/O and parallel file systems, run-time libraries for parallel computing, languages such as HPF and HPC++, problem-solving environments, grid generation technologies, load-balancing technologies, numerical systems and libraries, and more. The final section of the book is a discussion of important future problems for the high-performance science and engineering community, including high-performance computing in a grid environment. The CRPC Parallel Computing Handbook is edited by Ken Kennedy and Linda Torczon, Rice University; Jack Dongarra, University of Tennessee; Ian Foster, Argonne National Laboratory; Geoffrey Fox, Syracuse University; and Andy White, Los Alamos National Laboratory. |
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