This millennium will see the increased use of parallel computing technologies at all levels of mainstream computing. Most computer hardware will use these technologies to achieve higher computing speeds, high speed access to very large distributed databases and greater flexibility through heterogeneous computing. These developments can be expected to result in the extended use of all types of parallel computers in virtually all areas of human endeavour. Compute-intensive problems in emerging areas such as financial modelling and multimedia systems, in addition to traditional application areas of parallel computing such as scientific computing and simulation, will stimulate the developments. Parallel computing as a field of scientific research and development will move from a niche concentrating on solving compute-intensive scientific and engineering problems to become one of the fundamental computing technologies.This book gives a retrospective view of what has been achieved in the parallel computing field during the past three decades, as well as a prospective view of expected future developments./a

This millennium will see the increased use of parallel computing technologies at all levels of mainstream computing. Most computer hardware will use these technologies to achieve higher computing speeds, high speed access to very large distributed databases and greater flexibility through heterogeneous computing. These developments can be expected to result in the extended use of all types of parallel computers in virtually all areas of human endeavour. Computer-intensive problems in emerging areas such as financial modelling and multimedia systems, in addition to traditional application areas of parallel computing such as scientific computing and simulation, will stimulate the developments. Parallel computing as a field of scientific research and development will move from a niche concentrating on solving computer-intensive scientific and engineering problems to become one of the fundamental computing technologies. This book gives a retrospective view of what has been achieved in the parallel computing field during the past three decades, as well as a prospective view of expected future developments.

Computational Science is the scienti?c discipline that aims at the development and understanding of new computational methods and techniques to model and simulate complex systems. The area of application includes natural systems – such as biology, envir- mental and geo-sciences, physics, and chemistry – and synthetic systems such as electronics and ?nancial and economic systems. The discipline is a bridge b- ween ‘classical’ computer science – logic, complexity, architecture, algorithms – mathematics, and the use of computers in the aforementioned areas. The relevance for society stems from the numerous challenges that exist in the various science and engineering disciplines, which can be tackled by advances made in this ?eld. For instance new models and methods to study environmental issues like the quality of air, water, and soil, and weather and climate predictions through simulations, as well as the simulation-supported development of cars, airplanes, and medical and transport systems etc. Paraphrasing R. Kenway (R.D. Kenway, Contemporary Physics. 1994): ‘There is an important message to scientists, politicians, and industrialists: in the future science, the best industrial design and manufacture, the greatest medical progress, and the most accurate environmental monitoring and forecasting will be done by countries that most rapidly exploit the full potential ofcomputational science’. Nowadays we have access to high-end computer architectures and a large range of computing environments, mainly as a consequence of the enormous s- mulus from the various international programs on advanced computing, e.g.

Since the dawn of computing, the quest for a better understanding of Nature has been a driving force for technological development. Groundbreaking achievements by great scientists have paved the way from the abacus to the supercomputing power of today. When trying to replicate Nature in the computer’s silicon test tube, there is need for precise and computable process descriptions. The scienti?c ?elds of Ma- ematics and Physics provide a powerful vehicle for such descriptions in terms of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). Formulated as such equations, physical laws can become subject to computational and analytical studies. In the computational setting, the equations can be discreti ed for ef?cient solution on a computer, leading to valuable tools for simulation of natural and man-made processes. Numerical so- tion of PDE-based mathematical models has been an important research topic over centuries, and will remain so for centuries to come. In the context of computer-based simulations, the quality of the computed results is directly connected to the model’s complexity and the number of data points used for the computations. Therefore, computational scientists tend to ?ll even the largest and most powerful computers they can get access to, either by increasing the si e of the data sets, or by introducing new model terms that make the simulations more realistic, or a combination of both. Today, many important simulation problems can not be solved by one single computer, but calls for parallel computing.

The geosciences, particularly numerical weather prediction, are demanding the highest levels of available computer power. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, with its experience in using supercomputers in this field, organises every second year a workshop bringing together manufacturers, computer scientists, researchers and operational users to share their experiences and to learn about the latest developments. This book reports on the November 2000 workshop. It provides an excellent overview of the latest achievements in, and plans for the use of, new parallel techniques in meteorology, climatology and oceanography.

This is Volume II of the four-volume set LNCS 3991-3994 constituting the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2006. The 98 revised full papers and 29 revised poster papers of the main track presented together with 500 accepted workshop papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the four volumes. The coverage spans the whole range of computational science.

Euro-Par – the European Conference on Parallel Computing – is an international conference series dedicated to the promotion and advancement of all aspects of parallel computing. The major themes can be divided into the broad categories of hardware, software, algorithms, and applications for parallel computing. The objective of Euro-Par is to provide a forum within which to promote the dev- opment of parallel computing both as an industrial technique and an academic discipline, extending the frontier of both the state of the art and the state of the practice. This is particularlyimportant at a time when parallel computing is - dergoing strong and sustained development and experiencing real industrial take up. The main audience for and participants of Euro-Par are seen as researchers in academic departments, government laboratories, and industrial organisations. Euro-Par’s objective is to become the primarychoice of such professionals for the presentation of new results in their speci?c areas. Euro-Par is also interested in applications that demonstrate the e?ectiveness of the main Euro-Par themes. Euro-Par now has its own Internet domain with a permanent Web site where the historyof the conference series is described: http://www. euro-par. org. The Euro-Par conference series is sponsored bythe Association of Computer Machineryand the International Federation of Information Processing.