Thomas Sterling is Professor of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. He serves as the Executive Associate Director of the Center for Research in Extreme Scale Technologies (CREST) and as its Chief Scientist. He is most widely known for his pioneering work in commodity cluster computing as leader of the Beowulf Project for which he and colleagues were awarded the Gordon Bell Prize. Professor Sterling currently leads a team of researchers at IU to enable a new generation of extreme scale computing systems and applications. He is the co-author of six books and holds six patents. He has taught a graduate level course upon which this textbook will be heavily informed, five times.

High Performance Computing: Modern Systems and Practices is a fully comprehensive and easily accessible treatment of high performance computing, covering fundamental concepts and essential knowledge while also providing key skills training. With this book, domain scientists will learn how to use supercomputers as a key tool in their quest for new knowledge. In addition, practicing engineers will discover how supercomputers can employ HPC systems and methods to the design and simulation of innovative products, and students will begin their careers with an understanding of possible directions for future research and development in HPC.

Those who maintain and administer commodity clusters will find this textbook provides essential coverage of not only what HPC systems do, but how they are used.

• Covers enabling technologies, system architectures and operating systems, parallel programming languages and algorithms, scientific visualization, correctness and performance debugging tools and methods, GPU accelerators and big data problems
• Provides numerous examples that explore the basics of supercomputing, while also providing practical training in the real use of high-end computers
• Helps users with informative and practical examples that build knowledge and skills through incremental steps
• Features sidebars of background and context to present a live history and culture of this unique field
• Includes online resources, such as recorded lectures from the authors' HPC courses

1. Introduction2. HPC Architecture3. Commodity Clusters4. Benchmarking5. The Essential Moab6. SMP7. The Essential OpenMP8. The Essential MPI9. Parallel Algorithms10. Libraries11. Operating Systems12. Scientific Visualization13. Performance Monitoring14. Debugging15. Accelerators16. Essential OpenACC17. Mass Storage18. File Systems19. Map Reduce20. Checkpointing21. Beyond (Next Steps)
Appendices: Essential CLinux User Interface