Introduction

This two disc set of CD-ROMs contains a variety of educational and reference materials in the general area of high performance computing and communications.  The core material includes the lectures for Syracuse University's course CPS 615, Computational Science for Simulation Applications, as taught by Prof. Geoffrey C. Fox, as well as the text of two recent books on HPC, technical reports, and standards documents. The core material is designed to be pretty much self-contained, but we also include hyperlinks to a wide range of resources available on the Internet.

How to Use this Resource

To start browsing these CD-ROMs, load either Volume into your CD-ROM drive, fire up your favorite WWW browser and load the file index.html from the CD-ROM. Follow the links from this page according to your interests.  At the bottom of the index.html page is a link to the table of contents for the other Volume.  This file can help you locate resources of interested, but of course you must actually switch discs and load the index.html from the new Volume to get the full table of contents with functional hyperlinks.  The content of the two discs is arranged roughly as follows: This resource is designed to be approached in  two different ways.  First, we offer the "conventional" vew, as a set of course lectures and two books, along with suporting reference material.  Second, we offer a more topical organization, which allows you to find resources, both on the CD-ROMs and on the Internet, appropos of a given topic.

The bulk of the material on these CD-ROMs is designed to be accessed with any relatively recent web browser (i.e. Netscape Navigator 3.0, or Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0, or current versions of either browser are highly recommended). Support for frames and JavaScript are required. Some of the material on Volume 2 ("LecCorder" audio/video/slide presentations) will only work with Netscape Navigator.  This requirement is also noted on the Volume 2 index.html and on the appropriate pages.

Some of the technical reports included on these discs use Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). To view or print them, you will need a PDF viewer, such as Acrobat Reader from Adobe, which is freely available for most platforms.

You will notice that some hyperlinks are marked with colored darts ( or ) while other are not. Plain hyperlinks are references to material contained on these discs, while darts indicate material on the Internet. Yellow darts () indicate external material available from the Northeast Parallel Architectures Center's web site, and red darts () denote items elsewhere on the Internet. An Internet connection is required to follow any hyperlink marked with a dart.

Of course we do our best to keep our hyperlinks to Internet resources up to date, but obviously we cannot control external material, so it is possible you will encounter broken links. By bring these to our attention (e-mail cewes-cdrom@npac.syr.edu) you can help us make sure the next edition is as accurate as possible.

Your comments on the usefulness and usability of this resource are appreciated.  Please send email to cewes-cdrom@npac.syr.edu, and help us improve the next edition.