Customer Reviews

Supercomputing and the Transformation of Science (Scientific American Library)

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Easy to read overview of the field of supercomputing. Describes technologies (eg, relays to highly integrated circuits) and architectures (eg, scalar to vector, multiprocessor and massively parallel) used to effect supercomputing. Describes applications of supercomputing in physics, in constructing evolutionary trees from sequencing data, in molecular biology, engineering, planetary sciences, weather forecasting, and cosmology.

This is a great book to learn about the ways in which various areas of science and engineering have learned to use increased computing power. It is well-written by knowledgeable people, and is beautifully illustrated. Of course, the computers mentioned in the book are long obsolete [we have many of them at the Computer History Museum], but that does not matter, as the general methods remain. Of course, today, a desktop PC or server has more compute power than the multi-$M machines used when the book was written.

It would be nice if there were a newer version of this, are a similar book written more recently, but I don't know of any such (and I've asked around). So, this book is inexpensive, and very well worth owning.