Book excerpt: A clear illustration of how parallel computers can be successfully appliedto large-scale scientific computations. This book demonstrates how avariety of applications in physics, biology, mathematics and other scienceswere implemented on real parallel computers to produce new scientificresults. It investigates issues of fine-grained parallelism relevant forfuture supercomputers with particular emphasis on hypercube architecture. The authors describe how they used an experimental approach to configuredifferent massively parallel machines, design and implement basic systemsoftware, and develop algorithms for frequently used mathematicalcomputations. They also devise performance models, measure the performancecharacteristics of several computers, and create a high-performancecomputing facility based exclusively on parallel computers. By addressingall issues involved in scientific problem solving, Parallel ComputingWorks! provides valuable insight into computational science for large-scaleparallel architectures. For those in the sciences, the findings reveal theusefulness of an important experimental tool. Anyone in supercomputing andrelated computational fields will gain a new perspective on the potentialcontributions of parallelism. Includes over 30 full-color illustrations.