Applications, Tools and Techniques on the Road to Exascale Computing

Single processing units have now reached a point where further major improvements in their performance are restricted by their physical limitations. This is causing a slowing down in advances at the same time as new scientific challenges are demanding exascale speed. This has meant that parallel processing has become key to High Performance Computing (HPC). This book contains the proceedings of the 14th biennial ParCo conference, ParCo2011, held in Ghent, Belgium. The ParCo conferences have traditionally concentrated on three main themes: Algorithms, Architectures and Applications. Nowadays though, the focus has shifted from traditional multiprocessor topologies to heterogeneous and manycores, incorporating standard CPUs, GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) and FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). These platforms are, at a higher abstraction level, integrated in clusters, grids and clouds. The papers presented here reflect this change of focus. New architectures, programming tools and techniques are also explored, and the need for exascale hardware and software was also discussed in the industrial session of the conference. This book will be of interest to all those interested in parallel computing today, and progress towards the exascale computing of tomorrow.