Topic 9: Parallel and distributed programming (Introduction)

This topic provides a forum for presentation of new results and practical experience in the development of parallel and distributed programs. The development of high-performance, correct, portable, and scalable parallel programs is a hard task, requiring advanced algorithms, realistic modeling, adequate programming abstractions and models, efficient design tools, high performance languages and libraries, and experimental evaluation. Current challenges in this topic are concerned with improved solutions for conciliating the transparency and expressiveness of the programming abstractions and models, with new issues arising in modern applications with increasing problem size and complexity, and in heterogeneous computing infrastructures with varying performance, scalability, failure and dynamic behaviors. This motivates for example, abstractions for handling concurrency, parallelism and distribution, and support for predictable performance, self-adaptation, fault-tolerance, and large-scale deployment. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.