Discussing some key scientific and technological developments in high performance computing, identifying significant trends, and defining desirable research objectives, this text covers general concepts and emerging systems, software technology, algorithms and applications. Coverage includes hardware, software tools, networks and numerical methods, new computer architectures, and a discussion of future trends. Beyond purely scientific/engineering computing, the book extends to coverage of enterprise-wide, commercial applications, including papers on performance and scalability of database servers and Oracle DBM systems. Most papers are research level, but some are suitable for computer literate managers and technicians, making the book useful to users of commercial parallel computers.