Book excerpt: Designed for undergraduates, An Introduction to High-Performance Scientific Computing assumes a basic knowledge of numerical computation and proficiency in Fortran or C programming and can be used in any science, computer science, applied mathematics, or engineering department or by practicing scientists and engineers, especially those associated with one of the national laboratories or supercomputer centers. This text evolved from a new curriculum in scientific computing that was developed to teach undergraduate science and engineering majors how to use high-performance computing systems (supercomputers) in scientific and engineering applications. Designed for undergraduates, An Introduction to High-Performance Scientific Computing assumes a basic knowledge of numerical computation and proficiency in Fortran or C programming and can be used in any science, computer science, applied mathematics, or engineering department or by practicing scientists and engineers, especially those associated with one of the national laboratories or supercomputer centers. The authors begin with a survey of scientific computing and then provide a review of background (numerical analysis, IEEE arithmetic, Unix, Fortran) and tools (elements of MATLAB, IDL, AVS). Next, full coverage is given to scientific visualization and to the architectures (scientific workstations and vector and parallel supercomputers) and performance evaluation needed to solve large-scale problems. The concluding section on applications includes three problems (molecular dynamics, advection, and computerized tomography) that illustrate the challenge of solving problems on a variety of computer architectures as well as the suitability of a particular architecture to solving a particular problem. Finally, since this can only be a hands-on course with extensive programming and experimentation with a variety of architectures and programming paradigms, the authors have provided a laboratory manual and supporting software via anonymous ftp. Scientific and Engineering Computation series