Parallel and distributed computing has offered the opportunity of solving a wide range of computationally intensive problems by increasing the computing power of sequential computers. Although important improvements have been achieved in this field in the last 30 years, there are still many unresolved issues. These issues arise from several broad areas, such as the design of parallel systems and scalable interconnects, the efficient distribution of processing tasks, or the development of parallel algorithms.

This book provides some very interesting and highquality articles aimed at studying the state of the art and addressing current issues in parallel processing and/or distributed computing. The 14 chapters presented in this book cover a wide variety of representative works ranging from hardware design to application development. Particularly, the topics that are addressed are programmable and reconfigurable devices and systems, dependability of GPUs (General Purpose Units), network topologies, cache coherence protocols, resource allocation, scheduling algorithms, peertopeer networks, largescale network simulation, and parallel routines and algorithms. In this way, the articles included in this book constitute an excellent reference for engineers and researchers who have particular interests in each of these topics in parallel and distributed computing.