Parallel Computing Fundamentals Applications And New Directions

This volume gives an overview of the state-of-the-art with respect to the development of all types of parallel computers and their application to a wide range of problem areas. The international conference on parallel computing ParCo97 (Parallel Computing 97) was held in Bonn, Germany from 19 to 22 September 1997. The first conference in this biannual series was held in 1983 in Berlin. Further conferences were held in Leiden (The Netherlands), London (UK), Grenoble (France) and Gent (Belgium). From the outset the aim with the ParCo (Parallel Computing) conferences was to promote the application of parallel computers to solve real life problems. In the case of ParCo97 a new milestone was reached in that more than half of the papers and posters presented were concerned with application aspects. This fact reflects the coming of age of parallel computing. Some 200 papers were submitted to the Program Committee by authors from all over the world. The final programme consisted of four invited papers, 71 contributed scientific/industrial papers and 45 posters. In addition a panel discussion on Parallel Computing and the Evolution of Cyberspace was held. During and after the conference all final contributions were refereed. Only those papers and posters accepted during this final screening process are included in this volume. The practical emphasis of the conference was accentuated by an industrial exhibition where companies demonstrated the newest developments in parallel processing equipment and software. Speakers from participating companies presented papers in industrial sessions in which new developments in parallel computing were reported.

This millennium will see the increased use of parallel computing technologies at all levels of mainstream computing. Most computer hardware will use these technologies to achieve higher computing speeds, high speed access to very large distributed databases and greater flexibility through heterogeneous computing. These developments can be expected to result in the extended use of all types of parallel computers in virtually all areas of human endeavour. Computer-intensive problems in emerging areas such as financial modelling and multimedia systems, in addition to traditional application areas of parallel computing such as scientific computing and simulation, will stimulate the developments. Parallel computing as a field of scientific research and development will move from a niche concentrating on solving computer-intensive scientific and engineering problems to become one of the fundamental computing technologies. This book gives a retrospective view of what has been achieved in the parallel computing field during the past three decades, as well as a prospective view of expected future developments.

Parallel CFD 2000, the Twelfth in an International series of meetings featuring computational fluid dynamics research on parallel computers, was held May 22-25, 2000 in Trondheim, Norway.Following the trend of the past conferences, areas such as numerical schemes and algorithms, tools and environments, load balancing, as well as interdisciplinary topics and various kinds of industrial applications were all well represented in the work presented. In addition, for the first time in the Parallel CFD conference series, the organizing committee chose to draw special attention to certain subject areas by organizing a number of special sessions.We feel the emphasis of the papers presented at the conference reflect the direction of the research within parallel CFD at the beginning of the new millennium. It seems to be a clear tendency towards increased industrial exploitation of parallel CFD. Several presentations also demonstrated how new insight is being achieved from complex simulations, and how powerful parallel computers now make it possible to use CFD within a broader interdisciplinary setting.Obviously, successful application of parallel CFD still rests on the underlying fundamental principles. Therefore, numerical algorithms, development tools, and parallelization techniques are still as important as when parallel CFD was in is infancy. Furthermore, the novel concepts of affordable parallel computing as well as metacomputing show that exciting developments are still taking place.As is often pointed out however, the real power of parallel CFD comes from the combination of all the disciplines involved: Physics, mathematics, and computer science. This is probably one of the principal reasons for the continued popularity of the Parallel CFD Conferences series, as well as the inspiration behind much of the excellent work carried out on the subject. We hope that the papers in this book, both on an individual basis and as a whole, will contribute to that inspiration. Further details of Parallel CFD'99, as well as other conferences in this series, are available at http://www.parcfd.org

Since the creation of the term "Scientific Computing" and of its German counterpart "Wissenschaftliches Rechnen" (whoever has to be blamed for that), scientists from outside the field have been confused about the some what strange distinction between scientific and non-scientific computations. And the insiders, i. e. those who are, at least, convinced of always comput ing in a very scientific way, are far from being happy with this summary of their daily work, even if further characterizations like "High Performance" or "Engineering" try to make things clearer - usually with very modest suc cess, however. Moreover, to increase the unfortunate confusion of terms, who knows the differences between "Computational Science and Engineering" , as indicated in the title of the series these proceedings were given the honour to be published in, and "Scientific and Engineering Computing", as chosen for the title of our book? Actually, though the protagonists of scientific com puting persist in its independence as a scientific discipline (and rightly so, of course), the ideas behind the term diverge wildly. Consequently, the variety of answers one can get to the question "What is scientific computing?" is really impressive and ranges from the (serious) "nothing else but numerical analysis" up to the more mocking "consuming as much CPU-time as possible on the most powerful number crunchers accessible" .

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Parallel Computing Technologies, PaCT 2001, held in Novosibirsk, Russia in September 2001. The 36 revised full papers and 13 posters presented together with 4 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 81 submissions. The papers presented span the whole range of parallel processing from theory and software through architecture and applications. Among the topics addressed are shared memory systems, formal methods, networks of processes, cellular automata, mobile data access systems, Java programming, neuro-cluster computing, network clusters, load balancing, etc.

Euro-Parisaninternationalconferencededicatedtothepromotionandadvan- ment of all aspects of parallel computing. The major themes can be divided into the broad categories of hardware, software, algorithms and applications for p- allel computing. The objective of Euro-Par is to provide a forum within which to promote the development of parallel computing both as an industrial te- nique and an academic discipline, extending the frontier of both the state of the art and the state of the practice. This is particularly important at a time when parallel computing is undergoing strong and sustained development and experiencing real industrial take-up. The main audience for and participants in Euro-Parareseenasresearchersinacademicdepartments,governmentlabora- ries and industrial organisations. Euro-Par’s objective is to become the primary choice of such professionals for the presentation of new results in their specic areas. Euro-Par is also interested in applications which demonstrate the e - tiveness of the main Euro-Par themes. There is now a permanent Web site for the series http://brahms. fmi. uni-passau. de/cl/europar where the history of the conference is described. Euro-Par is now sponsored by the Association of Computer Machinery and the International Federation of Information Processing. Euro-Par’99 The format of Euro-Par’99follows that of the past four conferences and consists of a number of topics eachindividually monitored by a committee of four. There were originally 23 topics for this year’s conference. The call for papers attracted 343 submissions of which 188 were accepted. Of the papers accepted, 4 were judged as distinguished, 111 as regular and 73 as short papers.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Parallel Computation, ACPC'99, held in Salzburg, Austria in February 1999; the conference included special tracks on parallel numerics and on parallel computing in image processing, video processing, and multimedia. The volume presents 50 revised full papers selected from a total of 75 submissions. Also included are four invited papers and 15 posters. The papers are organized in topical sections on linear algebra, differential equations and interpolation, (Quasi-)Monte Carlo methods, numerical software, numerical applications, image segmentation and image understanding, motion estimation and block matching, video processing, wavelet techniques, satellite image processing, data structures, data partitioning, resource allocation and performance analysis, cluster computing, and simulation and applications.