Book excerpt: IC-SEC 2002 serves as a forum for engineers and scientists who are involved in the use of high performance computers, advanced numerical strategies, computational methods and simulation in various scientific and engineering disciplines. The conference creates a platform for presenting and discussing the latest trends and findings about the state of the art in their particular field(s) of interest. IC-SEC also provides a forum for the interdisciplinary blending of computational efforts in various diversified areas of science, such as biology, chemistry, physics and materials science, as well as all branches of engineering. The proceedings cover a broad range of topics and an application area which involves modelling and simulation work using high performance computers.