Book excerpt: Automatic Performance Tuning is a new software paradigm which enables software to be high performance in any computing environment. Its methodologies have been developed over the past decade, and it is now rapidly growing in terms of its scope and applicability, as well as in its scientific knowledge and technological methods. Software developers and researchers in the area of scientific and technical computing, high performance database systems, optimized compilers, high performance systems software, and low-power computing will find this book to be an invaluable reference to this powerful new paradigm.