High Performance Cluster Computing: Architectures and Systems, Vol. 1

I used the two books as part of a course which I taught at IIT Delhi during July-Dec 1999. The course was called "Special Topics in Computers" and was credited by Masters students from the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The idea behind the course was to introduce elements of Distributed and Clustered Computing to students who have already got some background in Computer Architecture. In my opinion, a single course in Computer Architecture at the Masters level cannot do justice to the developments that have taken place in this exciting field over the past decades. I have been teaching Computer Architecture at IIT Delhi for about 8 years now and find that the number of topics that I have to include in the course has been increasing very quickly over the years! In 1992, when I first taught the course, I used to teach about Pipelined Computers, Systolic Arrays, SIMD array processors, and Multiprocessors. As time has passed, it has become necessary to include topics such as high-performance interconnection networks, wormhole routing, cache coherence protocols, instruction pipelines, superscalar processors, and instruction-level parallelism. More recently, I have realized that it is also necessary to teach elements of distributed computing and clustered computing. I believe that a course on selected topics from distributed and clustered computing is essential to all branches of Engineering today. Ø High-performance computing is essential to all branches of Engineering, and high-performance clustered computing on clusters of workstations/PCs makes a lot of economical sense.Ø A course such as this is interesting because it is easy for the students to practice what is taught in such a class without too many infrastructures. This makes the course very exciting to students. When I taught parallel algorithms in my class, I could not ask my students to develop these algorithms for lack of good infrastructure. But a cluster of workstations and PCs is available in almost every University today.Ø Distributed computing is highly popular with students. Students are eager to learn Java and network programming. Rajkumar Buyya's edited volumes have arrived at the right time to provide the right kind of teaching material for the type of course which I have mentioned above. The first volume covers architectural and system-level issues of clustered computing systems. It has 36 chapters organized into 4 sections, spanning 811 pages. Section I develops the motivation for high-performance clustered computing. Section II introduces various networking protocols and I/O mechanisms that are useful in clustered computing. Section III covers OS issues such as process scheduling and load balancing. Section IV includes a number of case studies of existing systems. The editor has made a considerable effort in gathering learning material for the volume. I think that this volume could be an excellent te

There is a good effort by the author to bring this book. I am sure this is helpful for research and development in the field of High performance Cluster computing.I am very happy and proud to say that this author is my classmate and very good friend of mine.Sreekanth