The Dawn of Massively Parallel Processing in Meteorology presents collected papers of the third workshop on this topic held at the European Centre of Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). It provides an insight into the state of the art in using parallel processors operationally, and allows extrapolation to other time-critical applications. It also documents the advent of massively parallel systems to cope with these applications.

Weather forecasting and climatology have traditionally been users of the world's fastest supercomputers. The recent emergence of massively parallel supercomputers as likely successors to current vector supercomputers has created an acute need to convert weather and climate models to suit parallel supercomputers with thousands of processors. Several major efforts are underway worldwide to accomplish this. ECMWF has established itself as the central venue for bringing together operational weather forecasters, climate researchers and parallel computer manufacturers to share their experience on these efforts every second year. The recent dramatic developments in supercomputer manufacturing have made the 1992 ECMWF Workshop timelier than before.

The demand for greater computer power in numerical weather prediction and meteorological research is as strong as ever. The world meteorological community has tried to meet this demand by exploiting parallelism. In this field, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has established itself as the central venue for bringing together operational weather forecasters, climate researchers and parallel computer manufacturers to share their experiences through a series of workshops held every other year. This book reports on the latest workshop (2-6 December 1996) and is an excellent overview of the success which parallel systems have gained in meteorology worldwide, and how it was achieved. In addition, future trends in computer hardware and software development and its implications for meteorological computing are outlined.

This text on very large scale computation in the 21st century covers such topics as: challenges in the natural sciences and physics; chemistry; fluid dynamics; astrophysics; biology; challenges in engineering; challenges in algorithm design; and challenges in system design.

This book shows by example how to solve complex scientific problems with programs that run on high-performance computers. Combining case studies from a variety of problem domains, it shows how to map or transform an abstract problem into concrete solutions that execute rapidly and efficiently on available high-performance hardware.