Introduction to Parallel Computing (2nd Edition)

Introducation to Parallel Computing is a complete end-to-end source of information on almost all aspects of parallel computing from introduction to architectures to programming paradigms to algorithms to programming standards. It is the only book to have complete coverage of traditional Computer Science algorithms (sorting, graph and matrix algorithms), scientific computing algorithms (FFT, sparse matrix computations, N-body methods), and data intensive algorithms (search, dynamic programming, data-mining).

Customer Reviews:

Better read Journals than this book

By Michael Ludwig Chehab "Nebula Star" - November 28, 2005

I bought the book a few months ago as textbook for my semester class in high performance computing. After reading the first 3 chapters I realized that this book is a waste. The examples are only solved partially, a lot of jargons (they should have put the terminology in separate table, maybe).

I was hoping, by reading the book I'd learn something essential and got the basic philosophy of high-performance computing/parallel processing. Instead, I got more confused than before reading it! (I used to be real-time software programmer, so the field is not totally new to me). The authors tried to put everything in this small 633-pages book.

Even my professor said it is useless to read the book and referred us to other research papers [Robertazzi's papers], and yes, these IEEE/ACM papers are much clearly understood! I also found that some websites much better explaining the concept. Another book is also I guess better: "Fundamentals of Parallel Processing" by... read more

Too many mistakes.

By Erik R. Knowles "EK" - February 19, 2006

I agree with the other reviewers who have said that this book is sloppy. There are just far too many mistakes for a 2nd edition book; very discouraging in an Addison-Wesley print.

The content is OK, and fairly thorough, but as another reviewer noted, there's considerable handwaving going on in some of the explanations.

Bottom line: a cleaned-up 3rd edition could be a very good textbook. Too bad I'm stuck with the 2nd edition :(

A sloppily written book

By A Customer - January 17, 2004

The content should be accessible to any graduate student but the sloppy writing style has made it unnecessarily difficult to read. Out of the many poorly written places, here is an example. In section 6.3.5 on page 248, it wrote, "Recall from section 9.3.1..." But I am only in chapter 6, how can I recall something from chapter 9. I then checked chapter 9 and found out that the forward reference was not a typo. "Foundations of Multithreaded, Parallel, and Distributed Programming" by Gregory Andrews is a much better written book. Unfortunately, Gregory's book does not cover the same content.