This book provides a non-technical introduction to High Performance Computing applications together with advice about how beginners can start to write parallel programs. The authors show what HPC can offer geographers and social scientists and how it can be used in GIS. They provide examples of where it has already been used and suggestions for other areas of application in geography and the social sciences. Case studies drawn from geography explain the key principles and help to understand the logic and thought processes that lie behind the parallel programming.

Chapter 1. High Performance Computing: why bother with it?
Chapter 2. High Performance Computing applications in Geography and GIS
Chapter 3. Parallel and High Performance Computing: Concepts, Principles and Theory
Chapter 4. Types of Parallel Processing Hardware and Programming Paradigms
Chapter 5. Programming Vector Supercomputers
Chapter 6. Shared Loop and Data Parallel Programming
Chapter 7. Parallel Programming using Simple Message Passing
Chapter 8. Parallelising the Geographical Analysis Machine using MPI
Chapter 9. Optimising performance and debugging hints
Chapter 10. Putting it all together
Chapter 11. Epiglogue for Geographical and Social Scientists