Book excerpt: High Performance Computing is an integrated computing environment for solving large-scale computational demanding problems in science, engineering and business. Newly emerging areas of HPC applications include medical sciences, transportation, financial operations and advanced human-computer interface such as virtual reality. High performance computing includes computer hardware, software, algorithms, programming tools and environments, plus visualization. The book addresses several of these key components of high performance technology and contains descriptions of the state-of-the-art computer architectures, programming and software tools and innovative applications of parallel computers. In addition, the book includes papers on heterogeneous network-based computing systems and scalability of parallel systems. The reader will find information and data relative to the two main thrusts of high performance computing: the absolute computational performance and that of providing the most cost effective and affordable computing for science, industry and business. The book is recommended for technical as well as management oriented individuals.