Product Description
Concurrent computing is the concurrent (simultaneous) execution of multiple interacting computational tasks. These tasks may be implemented as separate programs, or as a set of processes or threads created by a single program. The tasks may also be executing on a single processor, several processors in close proximity, or distributed across a network. Concurrent computing is related to parallel computing, but focuses more on the interactions between tasks. Correct sequencing of the interactions or communications between different tasks, and the co-ordination of access to resources that are shared between tasks, are key concerns during the design of concurrent computing systems. This new book presents the latest research in the field from around the world. ... Read more

Product Description
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 all aspects of this field.

The first section of the book describes parallel models. It covers evolving computational systems, the decomposable bulk synchronous model, parallel random access machine-on-chip architecture, the parallel disks model, mobile agents, fault-tolerant computing, hierarchical performance modeling, the partitioned optical passive star network, and the reconfigurable mesh model. The subsequent section on parallel algorithms examines networks of workstations, grid and packet scheduling, the derandomization technique, isosurface extraction and rendering, suffix trees, and mobile computing algorithmics. The final part of the text highlights an array of problems and offers ways to combat these challenges.

This volume provides an up-to-date assessment of the models and algorithms involved in applying parallel computing to a variety of fields, from computational biology to wireless networking. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Not a handbook
This book is not a handbook in any traditional sense. Unfortunately, it feels more like a collection of articles by people who wanted to publish their own research in an overly pompous context. There is lots of hand-waving in the book, the authors write in the book things like "our initial [and only] experiment shows Y" and "we plan to do X". The book should have been titled something like "Contemporary Issues in Parallel Computing" instead. And the text is sloppy. If you want to read about what those guys the editors invited to contribute were researching in 2008, fine, but if you search for a good account of the best practices, established theories and academic consensus in parallel computing today, do not buy this book. Compared e.g. to the Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science, this book is a joke.

hardware and problems suited for that hardware
This CRC handbook gives us an impressive summary of the ideas in parallel computing. It describes the numerous hardware architectures that are currently in use. There is a wide variety of ways to bring many CPUs to bear on a large computational problem. The text also explains why parallel computing may be more widely used in future. It appears that the maximum performance of a single CPU is maxing out. Due in no small part to heat problems at gigahertz frequencies of operation.

So for future performance gains, being able to efficiently use several CPUs to decompose a problem might be necessary. For each architecture, you can get some idea of how to do this decomposition. From a reading, it is clear that not every problem will yield to parallel computing. But several classes of problems do. ... Read more

Product Description
* An invaluable reference for anyone designing new parallel or distributed systems.
* Includes detailed case studies of specific systems from Stanford, MIT, and other leading research universities.
* The authors emphasize performance, surveying all available techniques. ... Read more

Product Description
The State Of The Art Of Sensor Networks

Written by an international team of recognized experts in sensor networks from prestigious organizations such as Motorola, Fujitsu, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell University, and the University of Illinois, Handbook of Sensor Networks: Algorithms and Architectures tackles important challenges and presents the latest trends and innovations in this growing field.

Striking a balance between theoretical and practical coverage, this comprehensive reference explores a myriad of possible architectures for future commercial, social, and educational applications, and offers insightful information and analyses of critical issues, including:
* Sensor training and security
* Embedded operating systems
* Signal processing and medium access
* Target location, tracking, and sensor localization
* Broadcasting, routing, and sensor area coverage
* Topology construction and maintenance
* Data-centric protocols and data gathering
* Time synchronization and calibration
* Energy scavenging and power sources

With exercises throughout, students, researchers, and professionals in computer science, electrical engineering, and telecommunications will find this an essential read to bring themselves up to date on the key challenges affecting the sensors industry. ... Read more

Product Description
This book sets out the principles of parallel computing, explaining why, where, and how parallel computing is used. It is unique in its coverage of both conventional and neural computing (which act in ways similar to human brains), and also covers such topics as the fundamental paradigms employed in the field, how systems are programmed or trained, technical aspects including connectivity and processing element complexity, and how system performance is estimated (and why doing so is difficult). The penultimate chapter comprises a set of case studies of archetypal parallel computers, each study written by an individual closely connected with the system in question. The final chapter correlates the various aspects of parallel computing into a taxonomy of systems. ... Read more

Product Description

This book presents major advances in high performance computing as well as major advances due to high performance computing. It contains a collection of papers in which results achieved in the collaboration of scientists from computer science, mathematics, physics, and mechanical engineering are presented. From the science problems to the mathematical algorithms and on to the effective implementation of these algorithms on massively parallel and cluster computers we present state-of-the-art methods and technology as well as exemplary results in these fields. This book shows that problems which seem superficially distinct become intimately connected on a computational level.

Product Description
The book deals with the most recent technology of distributed computing.
As Internet continues to grow and provide practical connectivity between users of computers it has become possible to consider use of computing resources which are far apart and connected by Wide Area Networks.
Instead of using only local computing power it has become practical to access computing resources widely distributed. In some cases between different countries in other cases between different continents.
This idea of using computer power is similar to the well known electric power utility technology. Hence the name of this distributed computing technology is the Grid Computing.
Initially grid computing was used by technologically advanced scientific users.
They used grid computing to experiment with large scale problems which required high performance computing facilities and collaborative work.
In the next stage of development the grid computing technology has become effective and economically attractive for large and medium size commercial companies.
It is expected that eventually the grid computing style ofproviding computing power will become universal reaching every user in industry and business.

* Written by academic and industrial experts who have developed or used grid computing
* Many proposed solutions have been tested in real life applications
* Covers most essential and technically relevant issues in grid computing ... Read more

Product Description

Scientific and technical programmers can no longer afford to treat I/O as an afterthought. The speed, memory size, and disk capacity of parallel computers continue to grow rapidly, but the rate at which disk drives can read and write data is improving far less quickly. As a result, the performance of carefully tuned parallel programs can slow dramatically when they read or write files-and the problem is likely to get far worse.

Parallel input and output techniques can help solve this problem by creating multiple data paths between memory and disks.However, simply adding disk drives to an I/O system without considering the overall software design will not significantly improve performance. To reap the full benefits of a parallel I/O system, application programmers must understand how parallel I/O systems work and where the performance pitfalls lie.

Parallel I/O for High Performance Computing directly addresses this critical need by examining parallel I/O from the bottom up.This important new book is recommended to anyone writing scientific application codes as the best single source on I/O techniques and to computer scientists as a solid up-to-date introduction to parallel I/O research.

* An overview of key I/O issues at all levels of abstraction-including hardware, through the OS and file systems, up to very high-level scientific libraries.
* Describes the important features of MPI-IO, netCDF, and HDF-5 and presents numerous examples illustrating how to use each of these I/O interfaces.
* Addresses the basic question of how to read and write data efficiently in HPC applications.
* An explanation of various layers of storage - and techniques for using disks (and sometimes tapes) effectively in HPC applications.Amazon.com Review
Suitable for the scientific researcher, computer-science student, or anyone else who might be interested in high-end computers, Parallel I/O for High-Performance Computing is a remarkably clear guide to recent research and expertise in parallel computing, and centers on ways for computers to process very large data sets more efficiently.

Although the title makes it sound as if its focus were very narrow, this book delivers an engaging glimpse into the world of serious, high-end scientific computing. It begins with a thorough tour of the issues that surround data storage. (The author writes clearly and meticulously, and describes trends in data storage, from disk drives and RAID technology to newer developments, like holographic data-storage systems.) Standards that are used by parallel computers to connect to data storage in parallel architectures are surveyed; also, there's extensive coverage of parallel file systems that have attempted to solve the problem of accessing terabytes of information at high speeds, for simulations and forecasting applications.

This book is very good at describing and summarizing a host of standards that have been developed by both academic and corporate researchers. For the working scientific programmer, sections that look at specific APIs for fast parallel I/O perhaps will be more immediately useful. There's coverage of MPI-IO, HPF I/O, and SIO LLAPI (three possible standards for parallel computing) for optimized file I/O for parallel systems. A section on two scientific libraries (NetCDF and HDF) that simplify loading numerical data offers complete sample programs in C, which show these APIs in action.

The purpose of this book is to expose the reader to the state of the art in high-end parallel computing, and suggest that I/O often is the bottleneck to achieving the best possible performance in scientific software. This far-ranging and intelligent guide will benefit any academic or scientific programmer, as well as anyone who wants to understand the fascinating world of high-end parallel systems that are used for simulations and serious number crunching. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered:

• Overview of high-performance I/O requirements
• Trends in I/O performance
• I/O levels (RAID technology, parallel file systems)
• Storage devices (primary, secondary, and tertiary storage)
• Magnetic disk drives
• Disk performance
• Magnetic tape
• Optical disks
• Parallelism and I/O requirements
• In-depth introduction to RAID
• Interconnect standards: SCSI, High-Performance Parallel Interface (HIPPI), Gigabyte System Network (GSN), Fibre Channel, and message-passing networks
• Network-attached storage devices
• Holographic storage
• Unix file system
• Fault-tolerance and journaling
• Distributed file systems (DFS)
• Sun's Network File System (NFS)
• Shared-memory computer design and architecture
• Distributed-memory computers
• Parallel file systems: Intel Parallel File System (PFS), Parallel I/O File System (PIOFS), and General Parallel File System (GPFS)
• High-Performance File System (HPFS)
• Cluster file systems: XFS, Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS), and Berkeley River
• Review of studies on I/O access patterns for scientific software
• Collective I/O and performance
• Two-phase I/O
• Server-based collective I/O
• Disk-directed I/O (DDIO)
• Hints and automatic adaptation
• Research projects for improved parallel I/O
• Portable Parallel File Systems (PPFS)
• Panda
• Programming with low-level I/O APIs: MPI-IO, HPF I/O, and SIO Low-Level API (LLAPI)
• Scientific libraries for processing numerical data (NetCDF version 3.4 and HDF version 5)
• Sample code for reading and writing numerical data
• Fiber bundles for representing number data
• Out-of-core computations and algorithms
• Virtual memory
• Compiler-directed file layout
• Checkpointing techniques and libraries
• Data management and analysis
• Scientific databases (relational and object-oriented)
• Knowledge discovery and data mining for research applications

Customer Reviews (3)

Good book but out dated now (8/2010)
This is the only book I could find on parallel IO for HPC. It is a useful working reference and a good intro to parallel IO. The major issue now is that the book discusses outdated technology as of my reading (8/2010). Since the books publication much of the technology discussed has either fallen by the wayside to be replaced with other technologies or has advanced significantly. The most striking example is in the treatment of parallel file systems. The Lustre fs, the most prevalent parallel file system in 2010 is not even mentioned! On the positive side the treatment of MPI-IO is pretty good, and still relevant. It would be great if the author updated the book in a new edition.

should be 4 and a half stars
It's not perfect, but it definitely doesn't deserve the 1 star review that another reviewer gave it ( he apparently wanted a book on MPI programming, which I would suggest he then buy a book on MPI and/or MPI-IO rather than one on "Parallel I/O ..." ).
I read this book years ago, and purchased it again today, and am enjoying reading it again.It covers a diverse and broad range of subjects, without being too light or heavy in any particular area.Mostly I like that the author treats the subject comprehensively, rather than just a HOW-TO of parallel I/O programming ( which the first reviewer apparently expected ).There is discussion of everything from system architecture, to APIs, to physical hardware and interconnects.
Well done, if not perfect, and the contents definitely match the label. I would definitely suggest this book for anyone wanting a good introduction to the subject, or someone looking for a comprehensive overview that is enjoyable to read.

Disappointed
I bought this book recently to enhance my knowledge of parallel I/O to improve a climate model built on MPI technology. To my disappointment, the author spent less than 1/10th of the book to actual parallel I/O programming. And the mere effort is a list of a few MPI subroutines. The rest of the book tries to cover everything about high performance I/O but does not convey anything USEFUL. I feel the price is way too high for such a mediocre book that talks about too broad a topic and fail to focus on anything specific. I glanced through the book and read the chaptors that talked a little bit about MPI and scientific data management. And now the book is gathering dust on my shelf. ... Read more

Product Description

This collection of lectures presented at the First International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Grid Computing for Engineering—held at the University of Pécs in Hungary—addresses both pure computer-science aspects and their applications in computational mechanics and science. This unique record covers a wide range of theories related to high-performance computing, and topics include parallel environments, next-generation processors, architectures and methods for HPC, grids and cloud portals, domain decomposition methods, solver technology, and preconditioned iterative methods and hybrid time domain methods.

Product Description
Effective use of a supercomputer requires users to have a good algorithm and to express this algorithm in an appropriate language, and requires compilers to generate efficient code.This book investigates several problems facing compiler design for supercomputers, including building efficient and comprehensive data dependence graphs, recurrence relations, the management of compiler temporary variables, and WHILE loops.The book first proposes an efficient means of representing the flow of data in a program by labeling the arcs in a data dependence graph with "direction vectors" to show how the flow of data corresponds to the loop structure of the program. These data dependence direction vectors are then used in several high level compiler loop optimizations: loop vectorization, loop concurrentization, loop fusion, and loop interchanging. The book shows how to perform these transformations and how to use them to optimize programs for a wide range of supercomputers.The problems of recurrence relations studied include arithmetic recurrences with IF statements and recurrences involving both data and control dependence relations in a cycle. The wavefront method of solving recurrences is also treated. The book discusses ways to make the problem of managing temporary arrays more tractable. It concludes by offering several methods for executing WHILE loops and describes a general structure of an optimizing compiler for supercomputers developed from the author's experience with a test bed compiler.Michael Wolfe is Associate Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the Oregon Graduate Center Optimizing Supercompilers for Supercomputers is included in the series Research Monographs in Parallel Computing. Copublished with Pitman Publishing. ... Read more

Product Description
The prefix operation on a set of data is one of the simplest and most useful building blocks in parallel algorithms. This introduction to those aspects of parallel programming and parallel algorithms that relate to the prefix problem emphasizes its use in a broad range of familiar and important problems.The book illustrates how the prefix operation approach to parallel computing leads to fast and efficient solutions to many different kinds of problems. Students, teachers, programmers, and computer scientists will want to read this clear exposition of an important approach. ... Read more

Product Description
This book contains papers selected for presentation at theSixth Annual Workshop on Languages and Compilers forParallel Computing. The workshop washosted by the OregonGraduate Institute of Science and Technology. All themajorresearch efforts in parallel languages and compilersarerepresented in this workshop series.The 36 papers in the volume aregrouped under nine headings:dynamic data structures, parallel languages, HighPerformance Fortran, loop transformation, logic anddataflowlanguage implementations, fine grain parallelism,scalaranalysis, parallelizing compilers, and analysis of parallelprograms. The book represents a valuable snapshot of thestate of research in the field in 1993. ... Read more

Product Description
Advances in microelectronic technology have made massivelyparallel computing a reality and triggered an outburst ofresearch activity in parallel processing architectures andalgorithms. Distributed memorymultiprocessors - parallelcomputers that consist of microprocessorsconnected in aregular topology - are increasingly being used tosolvelarge problems in many application areas. In order to usethese computers for a specific application, existingalgorithms need to berestructured for the architecture andnew algorithms developed. The performance of a computationon a distributed memory multiprocessor isaffected by thenode and communication architecture, theinterconnectionnetwork topology, the I/O subsystem, and theparallelalgorithm and communication protocols. Each of theseparametersis a complex problem, and solutions require anunderstanding of the interactions among them.This book is based on the papers presented at theNATOAdvanced Study Institute held at Bilkent University, Turkey,inJuly 1991. The book is organized in five parts: Parallelcomputingstructures and communication, Parallel numericalalgorithms, Parallel programming, Fault tolerance, andApplications and algorithms. ... Read more

Product Description
Modern "non-strict" functional programming languages are a powerfulmeans of programming highly parallel computers but are intrinsicallydifficult to compile well because decisions about the ordering ofsubcomputations must be made at the time of compiling. This bookrepresents a new technique for compiling such languages by partitioninga program into sequential threads. While the interleaving of threads canvary at run time, within each thread the order is fixed.

A program is compiled by analyzing its data dependences and developingfrom that a set of partitioning constraints. These practical algorithmsare founded on a new theory of data dependence and ordering withinfunctional programs, which defines dependence graphs in terms of arewrite-rule operational semantics for the language.

By attacking the ordering problem directly, the book departs fromprevious approaches that obtain partitioning as a by-product ofoptimizing lazy evaluation and cleanly separates partitioning from othercode-generation issues. Furthermore, the method is flexible enough toproduce both lazy code and a less-restrictive "lenient" variant thatallows larger threads with only a slight decrease in expressive power.Code generation and optimization are explored in depth for bothuniprocessor and multiprocessor targets. ... Read more

Product Description
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Applied Parallel Computing, PARA'96, held in Lyngby, Denmark, in August 1996. The volume presents revised full versions of 45 carefully selected contributed papers together with 31 invited presentations. The papers address all current aspects of applied parallel computing relevant for industrial computations. The invited papers review the most important numerical algorithms and scientific applications on several types of parallel machines. ... Read more

Product Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing, ICA3PP 2005, held in Melbourne, Australia in October 2005.

The 27 revised full papers and 25 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 95 submissions. The book covers new architectures of parallel and distributed systems, new system management facilities, and new application algorithms with special focus on two broad areas of parallel and distributed computing, i.e., architectures, algorithms and networks, and systems and applications.

Product Description

The 9th ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking, and Parallel/Distributed Computing, held in Phuket Thailand on August 6 – 8, 2008 is aimed at bringing together researchers and scientist, businessmen and entrepreneurs, teachers and students to discuss the numerous fields of computer science, and to share ideas and information in a meaningful way. This publication captures 20 of the conference’s most promising papers, and we impatiently await the important contributions that we know these authors will bring to the field.

Product Description
Advances in optical technologies have made it possible toimplement optical interconnections in future massively parallelprocessing systems. Photons are non-charged particles, and do notnaturally interact. Consequently, there are many desirablecharacteristics of optical interconnects, e.g. high speed (speed oflight), increased fanout, high bandwidth, high reliability, longerinterconnection lengths, low power requirements, and immunity to EMIwith reduced crosstalk. Optics can utilize free-space interconnects aswell as guided wave technology, neither of which has the problems ofVLSI technology mentioned above. Optical interconnections can be builtat various levels, providing chip-to-chip, module-to-module,board-to-board, and node-to-node communications. Massively parallel processing using optical interconnections poses newchallenges; new system configurations need to be designed, schedulingand data communication schemes based on new resource metrics need tobe investigated, algorithms for a wide variety of applications need tobe developed under the novel computation models that opticalinterconnections permit, and so on. Parallel Computing Using Optical Interconnections is acollection of survey articles written by leading and active scientistsin the area of parallel computing using optical interconnections. Thisis the first book which provides current and comprehensive coverage ofthe field, reflects the state of the art from high-level architecturedesign and algorithmic points of view, and points out directions forfurther research and development. ... Read more