Arnold L Rosenberg – författare

Topics in Parallel and Distributed Computing provides resources and guidance for those learning PDC as well as those teaching students new to the discipline.

The pervasiveness of computing devices containing multicore CPUs and GPUs, including home and office PCs, laptops, and mobile devices, is making even common users dependent on parallel processing. Certainly, it is no longer sufficient for even basic programmers to acquire only the traditional sequential programming skills. The preceding trends point to the need for imparting a broad-based skill set in PDC technology.

However, the rapid changes in computing hardware platforms and devices, languages, supporting programming environments, and research advances, poses a challenge both for newcomers and seasoned computer scientists.

This edited collection has been developed over the past several years in conjunction with the IEEE technical committee on parallel processing (TCPP), which held several workshops and discussions on learning parallel computing and integrating parallel concepts into courses throughout computer science curricula.

The abstract branch of theoretical computer science known as Computation Theory typically appears in undergraduate academic curricula in a form that obscures both the mathematical concepts that are central to the various components of the theory and the relevance of the theory to the typical student. This regrettable situation is due largely to the thematic tension among three main competing principles for organizing the material in the course.

This book is motivated by the belief that a deep understanding of, and operational control over, the few "big" mathematical ideas that underlie Computation Theory is the best way to enable the typical student to assimilate the "big" ideas of Computation Theory into her daily computational life.

Computation theory is a discipline that uses mathematical concepts and tools to expose the nature of "computation" and to explain a broad range of computational phenomena: Why is it harder to perform some computations than others?  Are the differences in difficulty that we observe inherent, or are they artifacts of the way we try to perform the computations?  How does one reason about such questions?

This unique textbook strives to endow students with conceptual and manipulative tools necessary to make computation theory part of their professional lives. The work achieves this goal by means of three stratagems that set its approach apart from most other texts on the subject.

For starters, it develops the necessary mathematical concepts and tools from the concepts'' simplest instances, thereby helping students gain operational control over the required mathematics. Secondly, it organizes development of theory around four "pillars," enabling students to see computational topics that have the same intellectual origins in physical proximity to one another. Finally, the text illustrates the "big ideas" that computation theory is built upon with applications of these ideas within "practical" domains in mathematics, computer science, computer engineering, and even further afield.

Suitable for advanced undergraduate students and beginning graduates, this textbook augments the "classical" models that traditionally support courses on computation theory with novel models inspired by "real, modern" computational topics,such as  crowd-sourced computing, mobile computing, robotic path planning, and volunteer computing.

Arnold L. Rosenberg is Distinguished Univ. Professor Emeritus at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA. Lenwood S. Heath is Professor at Virgina Tech, Blacksburg, USA.