by John E. West, for HPCwire
Petascale Computing: Algorithms and Applications, edited by David A. Bader (Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2007), is the first book in CRC’s Computational Science Series, edited by Horst Simon at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Although the book is a collection of papers, Bader has done an excellent job of creating a compilation that holds together and covers a broad topic very well. At the same time, Petascale Computing remains accessible to anyone with HPC or scientific application experience.
Throughout this book the focus stays on performance — not just the numbers, but what drives the numbers to fall out the way they do, and, perhaps just as important, why we need the performance in the first place. The end result educates and informs our journey through petascale and into exascale, while serving to motivate us to travel as fast as we can toward the goal.
