Introduction

This CD-ROM 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

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.  Second, we offer a more topical organization, which allows you to find resources, both on the CD-ROM and on the Internet, appropos of a given topic.

The bulk of the material on this CD-ROM is designed to be accessed with any relatively recent web browser (i.e. Netscape Navigator 3.0, or Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0, or higher). Support for frames and JavaScript are required. Audio recordings of some of the lectures are included in the CPS 615 course materials. To use these recordings, you will have to install the RealPlayer, which is freely available from RealNetworks.

Some of the technical reports included on this CD-ROM are PostScript files.  To view them, you will have to have a PostScript viewer, or a PostScript-capable printer.

Obviously hyperlinks which point to Internet resources will require that your computer have an active Internet connection if you want to follow them, but an Internet connection is not required to view the core material.