Parallel Time

From Pulitzer Prize winner Brent Staples, an evocative memoir that poses universal questions: Where does the family end and the self begin? What do we owe our families, and what do we owe our dreams for ourselves? What part of the past is a gift and what part a shackle? For Brent Staples there is the added dimension of race: moving from a black world into one largely defined by whites. The oldest song among nine children, Brent grew up in a small industrial town near Philadelphia. First a scholarship to a local college and then one for graduate study at the University of Chicago pulled him out of the close family circle. While he was away, the industries that supported the town failed, and drug dealing rushed in to fill the economic void. News of arrests and premature deaths among Brent's childhood friends underscored the precariousness of his perch in a world of mostly white achievers. A younger brother became a cocaine dealer and was murdered by one of his "clients." His death propelled Brent into a reconsideration of his childhood and coming-of-age that offers vivid portraits of family and place, of values that supported and pressures that tore apart, of the appeal and pain of entering a predominantly white world, and of the strengths and vulnerabilities of the black world he grew away from.

Locally computable (NC0) functions are "simple" functions for which every bit of the output can be computed by reading a small number of bits of their input. The study of locally computable cryptography attempts to construct cryptographic functions that achieve this strong notion of simplicity and simultaneously provide a high level of security. Such constructions are highly parallelizable and they can be realized by Boolean circuits of constant depth. This book establishes, for the first time, the possibility of local implementations for many basic cryptographic primitives such as one-way functions, pseudorandom generators, encryption schemes and digital signatures. It also extends these results to other stronger notions of locality, and addresses a wide variety of fundamental questions about local cryptography. The author's related thesis was honorably mentioned (runner-up) for the ACM Dissertation Award in 2007, and this book includes some expanded sections and proofs, and notes on recent developments. The book assumes only a minimal background in computational complexity and cryptography and is therefore suitable for graduate students or researchers in related areas who are interested in parallel cryptography. It also introduces general techniques and tools which are likely to interest experts in the area.

The national bestselling author of The God Equation takes us on a thrilling journey to explore black holes and time machines, multidimensional space and the possibility that parallel universes may lay alongside our own. “A wonderful tour, with an expert guide.” —Brian Greene, New York Times bestselling author of The Elegant Universe Kaku skillfully guides us through the latest innovations in string theory and its latest iteration, M-theory, which posits that our universe may be just one in an endless multiverse, a singular bubble floating in a sea of infinite bubble universes. If M-theory is proven correct, we may perhaps finally find answer to the question, “What happened before the big bang?” This is an exciting and unforgettable introduction into the new cutting-edge theories of physics and cosmology from one of the pre-eminent voices in the field.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics, PPAM 2002, held in Naleczow, Poland, in September 2001. The 101 papers presented were carefully reviewed and improved during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The book offers topical sections on distributed and grid architectures, scheduling and load balancing, performance analysis and prediction, parallel non-numerical algorithms, parallel programming, tools and environments, parallel numerical algorithms, applications, and evolutionary computing and neural networks.

This is an introductory book on supercomputer applications written by a researcher who is working on solving scientific and engineering application problems on parallel computers. The book is intended to quickly bring researchers and graduate students working on numerical solutions of partial differential equations with various applications into the area of parallel processing.The book starts from the basic concepts of parallel processing, like speedup, efficiency and different parallel architectures, then introduces the most frequently used algorithms for solving PDEs on parallel computers, with practical examples. Finally, it discusses more advanced topics, including different scalability metrics, parallel time stepping algorithms and new architectures and heterogeneous computing networks which have emerged in the last few years of high performance computing. Hundreds of references are also included in the book to direct interested readers to more detailed and in-depth discussions of specific topics.

The ability of parallel computing to process large data sets and handle time-consuming operations has resulted in unprecedented advances in biological and scientific computing, modeling, and simulations. Exploring these recent developments, the Handbook of Parallel Computing: Models, Algorithms, and Applications provides comprehensive coverage on a

Parallelanddistributedprocessing,althoughwithinthefocusofcomputerscience researchforalongtime,isgainingmoreandmoreimportanceinawidespectrum of applications. These proceedings aim to demonstrate the use of parallel and distributed processing concepts in di?erent application ?elds, and attempt to spark interest in novel research directions to advance the embracing model of high-performance computing research in general. The objective of these workshops is to speci?cally address researchers c- ing from university, industry and governmental research organizations and application-oriented companies, in order to close the gap between purely s- enti?c research and the applicability of the research ideas to real-life problems. Euro-Par is an annual series of international conferences dedicated to the promotionandadvancementofallaspectsofparallelanddistributedcomputing. The 2007 event was the 13th issue of the conference. Euro-Par has for a long time been eager to attract colocated events sharing the same goal of promoting the development of parallel and distributed computing, both as an industrial technique and an academic discipline, extending the frontier of both the state of the art and the state of the practice. Since 2006, Euro-Par o?ers researchersthe chance to colocate advanced technical workshops back-to-back with the main conference. This is for a mutual bene?t: the workshops can take advantage of all technical and social facilities which are set up for the conference, so that the organizational tasks are kept to a minimal level; the conference can rely on workshopstoexperimentwithspeci?careasofresearchwhicharenotyetmature enough, or too speci?c, to lead to an o?cial, full-?edged topic at the conference.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Processing, LCPC 2002, held in College Park, MD, USA in July 2002. The 26 revised full papers presented were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from 32 submissions. All current issues in parallel processing are addressed, in particular memory-constrained computation, compiler optimization, performance studies, high-level languages, programming language consistency models, dynamic parallelization, parallelization of data mining algorithms, parallelizing compilers, garbage collection algorithms, and evaluation of iterative compilation.