Study the past, if you would divine the future. -CONFUCIUS A well written, organized, and concise survey is an important tool in any newly emerging field of study. This present text is the first of a new series that has been established to promote the publications of such survey books. A survey serves several needs. Virtually every new research area has its roots in several diverse areas and many of the initial fundamental results are dispersed across a wide range of journals, books, and conferences in many dif ferent sub fields. A good survey should bring together these results. But just a collection of articles is not enough. Since terminology and notation take many years to become standardized, it is often difficult to master the early papers. In addition, when a new research field has its foundations outside of computer science, all the papers may be difficult to read. Each field has its own view of el egance and its own method of presenting results. A good survey overcomes such difficulties by presenting results in a notation and terminology that is familiar to most computer scientists. A good survey can give a feel for the whole field. It helps identify trends, both successful and unsuccessful, and it should point new researchers in the right direction.

This set of technical books contains all the information presented at the 1995 International Conference on Parallel Processing. This conference, held August 14 - 18, featured over 100 lectures from more than 300 contributors, and included three panel sessions and three keynote addresses. The international authorship includes experts from around the globe, from Texas to Tokyo, from Leiden to London. Compiled by faculty at the University of Illinois and sponsored by Penn State University, these Proceedings are a comprehensive look at all that's new in the field of parallel processing.

Motivation It is now possible to build powerful single-processor and multiprocessor systems and use them efficiently for data processing, which has seen an explosive ex pansion in many areas of computer science and engineering. One approach to meeting the performance requirements of the applications has been to utilize the most powerful single-processor system that is available. When such a system does not provide the performance requirements, pipelined and parallel process ing structures can be employed. The concept of parallel processing is a depar ture from sequential processing. In sequential computation one processor is in volved and performs one operation at a time. On the other hand, in parallel computation several processors cooperate to solve a problem, which reduces computing time because several operations can be carried out simultaneously. Using several processors that work together on a given computation illustrates a new paradigm in computer problem solving which is completely different from sequential processing. From the practical point of view, this provides sufficient justification to investigate the concept of parallel processing and related issues, such as parallel algorithms. Parallel processing involves utilizing several factors, such as parallel architectures, parallel algorithms, parallel programming lan guages and performance analysis, which are strongly interrelated. In general, four steps are involved in performing a computational problem in parallel. The first step is to understand the nature of computations in the specific application domain.

This text gives the proceedings for the fifth conference on parallel processing for scientific computing.

Most of the articles in this book deal with static or point-to-pointInterconnection Networks. In particular, new constructions are proposed basedon different tools from discrete mathematics. Many new records have beenestablished in the table of the maximum number of vertices of graphs withmaximum degree &Dgr; and diameter D. Properties of thesenetworks (and of more classical ones) are analyzed in many of the otherpapers. About 40% of the articles deal with fault tolerance orvulnerability properties using either combinatorial tools or probabilisticones.