This book constitutes a carefully arranged selection of revised full papers chosen from the presentations given at the Second International Conference on Vector and Parallel Processing - Systems and Applications, VECPAR'96, held in Porto, Portugal, in September 1996. Besides 10 invited papers by internationally leading experts, 17 papers were accepted from the submitted conference papers for inclusion in this documentation following a second round of refereeing. A broad spectrum of topics and applications for which parallelism contributes to progress is covered, among them parallel linear algebra, computational fluid dynamics, data parallelism, implementational issues, optimization, finite element computations, simulation, and visualisation.

The papers in this volume were selected for presentation at the Fourth Annual International Computing and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON’98), held on August 12–14, 1998, in Taipei. The topics cover most aspects of theoretical computer science and combinatorics related to computing. Submissions to the conference this year was only conducted electronically. Thanks to the excellent software developed by the system team of the Institute of Information Science, we were able to make virtually all communications through the World Wide Web. A total of 69 papers was submitted in time to be considered, of which 36 papers were accepted for presentation at the conference. In addition to these contributed papers, the conference also included four invited presentations by Christo Papadimitriou, Michael Fishcher, Fan Chung Graham and Rao Kosaraju. It is expected that most of the accepted papers will appear in a more complete form in scienti?c journals. Moreover, selected papers will appear in a special issue of Theoretical Computer Science. We thank all program committee members, their support sta? and referees for excellent work within demanding time constraints. We thank all authors who submitted papers for consideration. We are especially grateful to our colleagues who worked hard and o?ered widely di?ering talents to make the conference both possible and enjoyable. August 1998 Wen-Lian Hsu and Ming-Yang Kao Program Co-chairs COCOON’98 Organization COCOON’98 is organized by the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC and in cooperation with Institute of Information and Computing Machinery (IICM), Taiwan, ROC.

Unmatched: 50 Years of Supercomputing: A Personal Journey Accompanying the Evolution of a Powerful Tool The rapid and extraordinary progress of supercomputing over the past half-century is a powerful demonstration of our relentless drive to understand and shape the world around us. In this book, David Barkai offers a unique and compelling account of this remarkable technological journey, drawing from his own rich experiences working at the forefront of high-performance computing (HPC). This book is a journey delineated as five decade-long ‘epochs’ defined by the systems’ architectural themes: vector processors, multi-processors, microprocessors, clusters, and accelerators and cloud computing. The final part examines key issues of HPC and discusses where it might be headed. A central goal of this book is to show how computing power has been applied, and, more importantly, how it has impacted and benefitted society. To this end, the use of HPC is illustrated in a range of industries and applications, from weather and climate modeling to engineering and life sciences. As such, this book appeals to both students and general readers with an interest in HPC, as well as industry professionals looking to revolutionize their practice.