From the Author

Parallel computing has been given a fresh breath of life since the emergence of multicore architectures in the first decade of the new century. The new platforms demand a new approach to software development; one that blends the tools and established practices of the Network-of-Workstations (NoWs) era with emerging software platforms such as CUDA. This book tries to address this need by covering the dominant contemporary tools and techniques, both in isolation but also most importantly, in combination with each other. We strive to provide examples where multiple platforms and programming paradigms (e.g. message passing and threads) are effectively combined. ``Hybrid'' computation, as it is usually called, is a new trend in high performance computing, one that could possibly allow software to scale to the ``millions of threads'' required for exascale performance. In that regard, this book is unique in the available literature.All chapters are accompanied by extensive examples and practice problems with an emphasis on putting them to work, while comparing alternative design scenarios. All the little details that can make the difference between a productive software development and a stressed exercise in futility, are presented in a orderly fashion.The book covers the latest advances in tools that have been inherited from the 1990s (e.g. the OpenMP and MPI standards), but also more cutting-edge platforms, such as the Qt library with its sophisticated thread management, and the Thrust template library, with its capability to deploy the same software over diverse multicore architectures, including both CPUs and Graphical Processing Units (GPUs).

About the Author

Gerassimos Barlas is a Professor with the Computer Science & Engineering Department, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE. His research interest includes parallel algorithms, development, analysis and modeling frameworks for load balancing, and distributed Video on-Demand. Prof. Barlas has taught parallel computing for more than 12 years, has been involved with parallel computing since the early 90s, and is active in the emerging field of Divisible Load Theory for parallel and distributed systems.