The papers present in this text survey both distributed shared memory (DSM) efforts and commercial DSM systems. The book discusses relevant issues that make the concept of DSM one of the most attractive approaches for building large-scale, high-performance multiprocessor systems. The authors provide a general introduction to the DSM field as well as a broad survey of the basic DSM concepts, mechanisms, design issues, and systems. The book concentrates on basic DSM algorithms, their enhancements, and their performance evaluation. In addition, it details implementations that employ DSM solutions at the software and the hardware level. This guide is a research and development reference that provides state-of-the art information that will be useful to architects, designers, and programmers of DSM systems.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems, OPODIS 2003, held at La Martinique, French West Indies in December 2003. The 19 revised full papers presented together with abstracts of 3 invited talks were carefully selected from 61 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on distributed and multiprocessor algorithms; peer-to peer systems and middleware; real-time and embedded systems; and verification, modeling, and performance of distributed systems.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Cluster Computing, IWCC 2001, held in Mangalia, Romania in September 2001. The 24 contributed papers presented together with 8 invited papers were carefully reviewed and revised for inclusion in the book. All current aspects of cluster computing are addressed, ranging from scheduling and load balancing to grids.

I wish to welcome all of you to the International Symposium on High Perf- mance Computing 2000 (ISHPC 2000) in the megalopolis of Tokyo. After having two great successes with ISHPC’97 (Fukuoka, November 1997) and ISHPC’99 (Kyoto, May 1999), many people have requested that the symposium would be held in the capital of Japan and we have agreed. I am very pleased to serve as Conference Chair at a time when high p- formance computing (HPC) has a signi?cant in?uence on computer science and technology. In particular, HPC has had and will continue to have a signi?cant - pact on the advanced technologies of the “IT” revolution. The many conferences and symposiums that are held on the subject around the world are an indication of the importance of this area and the interest of the research community. One of the goals of this symposium is to provide a forum for the discussion of all aspects of HPC (from system architecture to real applications) in a more informal and personal fashion. Today we are delighted to have this symposium, which includes excellent invited talks, tutorials and workshops, as well as high quality technical papers.

On the 23rd of April, 2001, the 6th Workshop on High-Level Parallel P- gramming Models and Supportive Environments (LCTES’98) was held in San Francisco. HIPShas been held over the past six years in conjunction with IPDPS, the Internation Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium. The HIPSworkshop focuses on high-level programming of networks of wo- stations, computing clusters and of massively-parallel machines. Its goal is to bring together researchers working in the areas of applications, language design, compilers, system architecture and programming tools to discuss new devel- ments in programming such systems. In recent years, several standards have emerged with an increasing demand of support for parallel and distributed processing. On one end, message-passing frameworks, such as PVM, MPI and VIA, provide support for basic commu- cation. On the other hand, distributed object standards, such as CORBA and DCOM, provide support for handling remote objects in a client-server fashion but also ensure certain guarantees for the quality of services. The key issues for the success of programming parallel and distributed en- ronments are high-level programming concepts and e?ciency. In addition, other quality categories have to be taken into account, such as scalability, security, bandwidth guarantees and fault tolerance, just to name a few. Today’s challenge is to provide high-level programming concepts without s- ri?cing e?ciency. This is only possible by carefully designing for those concepts and by providing supportive programming environments that facilitate program development and tuning.