Book excerpts:

The goal of this book is to provide a practitioner's guide for students, programmers, engineers, and scientists who wish to design and build efficient and cost-effective programs for parallel and distributed computer systems. This book covers both the techniques used to design parallel programs and the tools used to implement these programs. Readers is assumes to have familiarity with sequential programming, but no prior exposure to parallel computing.

Designing and Building Parallel Programs promotes a view of parallel programming as an engineering discipline, in which programs are developed in a methodical fashion and both cost and performance are considered in a design. This view is reflected in the structure of the book, which is divided into three parts.

The first part, Concepts, provides a thorough discussion of parallel algorithm design, performance analysis, and program construction, with numerous examples to illustrate fundamental principles.

The second part, Tools, provides an in-depth treatment of four parallel programming tools: the parallel languages Compositional C++ (CC++), Fortran M (FM), and High Performance Fortran (HPF), and the Message Passing Interface (MPI) library. HPF and MPI are standard parallel programming systems, and CC++ and FM are modern languages particularly well-suited for parallel software engineering. Part II also describes tools for collecting and analyzing performance data.

The third part, Resources, surveys some fundamental parallel algorithms and provides many pointers to other sources of information.

Designing and Building Parallel Programs can be used as both a textbook for students and a reference book for professionals. Because the hands-on aspects of parallel programming are so important, professionals may find it useful to approach the book with a programming problem in mind and make the development of a solution to this problem part of the learning process. The basic materials have been classroom tested.

Reviews:

Amazon.com

:) "I enjoyed this book a great deal. The concepts and rational for parallel design are well covered."

:) "A good book for people new to parallel concepts. Good discussion of parallel concepts and current parallel tools. Easy to read."