Recent developments in high-performance computing and simulation: Distributed systems, architectures, algorithms, and applications

The special issue of Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience contains papers representing recent advances in the area of high-performance computing and simulation. 'Finding Near-Perfect Parameters for Hardware and Code Optimizations by Automatic Multi-Objective Design Space Explorations' by Ralf Jahr, Horia Calborean, Lucian Vintan, and Theo Ungerer introduces FADSE, a design space exploration tool that automatically finds nearly optimal processor design configurations for a given code. 'Cache-oblivious Matrix Algorithms in the Age of Multi- and Many-Cores' by Alexander Heinecke and Carsten Trinitis highlights the issue of increasing vector unit width that goes along with increasing core counts on x86 processor architectures. New System Software for Parallel Programming Models on the Intel SCC Many-core Processor' by Carsten Clauss, Stefan Lankes, Pablo Reble, and Thomas Bemmerl gives a detailed report on the authors' experiences with implementing parallel programming libraries and tools for the 48-core Intel Single Cloud Chip (SCC) processor. 'Interoperating Grid Infrastructures with the GridWay Metascheduler' by Ismael Marin Carrion, Eduardo Huedo, and Ignacio M. Llorente describes GridWay, a metascheduler for sharing compute resources within common grid middleware. Improved Real-Time Scheduling for Periodic Tasks on Multiprocessors' by Prapaporn Rattanatamrong and Jose A. B. Fortes presents a novel algorithm for scheduling applications with real-time requirements to supercomputers.