Preface Welcome to Designing and Building Parallel Programs! My goal in this book is to provide a practitioner's guide for students, programmers, engineers, and scientists who wish to design and build efficient and cost-effective programs for parallel and distributed computer systems. I cover both the techniques used to design parallel programs and the tools used to implement these programs. I assume familiarity with sequential programming, but no prior exposure to parallel computing. Designing and Building Parallel Programs promotes a view of parallel programming as an engineering discipline, in which programs are developed in a methodical fashion and both cost and performance are considered in a design. This view is reflected in the structure of the book, which is divided into three parts. The first part, Concepts, provides a thorough discussion of parallel algorithm design, performance analysis, and program construction, with numerous examples to illustrate fundamental principles. The second part, Tools, provides an in-depth treatment of four parallel programming tools: the parallel languages Compositional C++ (CC++), Fortran M (FM), and High Performance Fortran (HPF), and the Message Passing Interface (MPI) library. HPF and MPI are standard parallel programming systems, and CC++ and FM are modern languages particularly well-suited for parallel software engineering. Part II also describes tools for collecting and analyzing performance data. The third part, Resources surveys some fundamental parallel algorithms and provides many pointers to other sources of information. A unique feature of this book is that it is also a guide to a larger resource accessible via the Internet and the World Wide Web. Designing and Building Parallel Programs (Online) provides online access to the book's contents and also allows you to download the parallel tools described in the book, to access example programs and other educational materials, and to browse through a wealth of other online information on parallel and distributed computing. The online version is described in Chapter 13. 0201575949P04062001 Excerpted from Designing and Building Parallel Programs: Concepts and Tools for Parallel Software Engineering by Ian Foster All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
