Book excerpt: This book contains mainly a selection of papers that were presented at the International Workshop on High Performance Computing/or Computer Graphics and Visualisation, held in Swansea, United Kingdom on 3-4 July 1995. The workshop was sponsored by the HEFCWI Initiative on ·Parallel Computing - Foundations and Applications·, and it has provided the international computer graphics community with a platform for: • assessing and reviewing the impact of the development of high performance computing on the progress of computer graphics and visualisation; • presenting the current use of high performance computing architecture and software tools in computer graphics and visualisation, and the development of parallel graphics algorithms; • identifying potential high performance computing applications in computer graphics and visualisation, and encouraging members of the graphics community to think about their problems from the perspective of parallelism. The book is divided into six sections. The first section, which acts as the introduction of the book, gives an overview of the current state of the art It contains a comprehensive survey, by Whitman, of parallel algorithms for computer graphics and visualisation; and a discussion, by Hansen, on the past, present and future high performance computing applications in computer graphics and visualisation. The second section is focused on the design and implementation of high performance architecture, software tools and algorithms for surface rendering.