Introduction to Parallel Computing, Second Edition

Preface

Since the 1994 release of the text “Introduction to Parallel Computing: Design and Analysis of Algorithms” by the same authors, the field of parallel computing has undergone significant changes. Whereas tightly coupled scalable message-passing platforms were the norm a decade ago, a significant portion of the current generation of platforms consists of inexpensive clusters of workstations, and multiprocessor workstations and servers. Programming models for these platforms have also evolved over this time. Whereas most machines a decade back relied on custom APIs for messaging and loop-based parallelism, current models standardize these APIs across platforms. Message passing libraries such as PVM and MPI, thread libraries such as POSIX ...