PDSEC Introduction

Welcome to the 14th IEEE International Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Scientific and Engineering Computing (PDSEC-13), held on May 24, 2013 in Boston, USA, in conjunction with the 27th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2013). The field of high performance computing has earned prominence through advances in electronic and integrated technologies. Current times are very exciting and the years to come will witness a proliferation in the use of parallel and distributed systems. In particular, 2013 saw a continuation in the increase in the use of board-level massively parallel processors for scientific applications, with one third of the papers of PDSEC-13 utilizing GP-GPUs and manycore processors for this purpose. We also saw a continuation of an emphasis on the orientation to Exascale computing and related concerns from 2013. The scientific and engineering application domains have a key role in shaping future research and development activities in academia and industry, especially when the solution of large and complex problems must cope with tight timing schedules. One of the most challenging issues facing scientific and engineering computing today is reliably scaling key applications to the petascale and beyond. This year we were especially delighted to have Frank Mueller, Professor in Computer Science at North Carolina State University, delivered the PDSEC-13 keynote speech On Determining a Viable Path to Resilience at Exascale. For this year’s workshop we have received many highquality submissions from Asia Pacific, Europe, and North and South America. In a peer-reviewing phase with at least 3 reviews per paper, the submissions were judged by originality, relevance, technical quality, and clarity of presentation. Based on the reviews, we decided to accept 14 high-quality papers for presentation in the technical program of PDSEC-13 out of 42 papers submitted. In particular, we are delighted this year to offer a Best Paper Award to Manaschai Kunaseth, Rajiv Kalia, Aiichiro Nakano, Priya Vashishta, David Richards, and James Glosli from the University of Southern California and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for their paper Performance Characteristics of Hardware Transactional Memory for Molecular Dynamics Application on BlueGene/Q. The annual PDSEC workshop brings together researchers from computer science, applied mathematics and other application areas of high-performance computing to present, discuss and exchange ideas, results, work in progress and experiences in the area of parallel and distributed computing for problems in science and engineering applications and inter-disciplinary applications. The application areas include, but are not limited to, the following: computational fluid dynamics and mechanics, material sciences, space, weather, climate systems and global changes, computational environment and energy systems, computational ocean and earth sciences, computational chemistry, computational physics, combustion system simulation, bioinformatics and computational biology, medical applications, combinatorial and global optimization problems, structural engineering, computer graphics. More general topics like scheduling and load balancing, loop and task parallelism, domain decomposition, or performance modeling and evaluation of scientific and engineering computing are also covered. The program for this workshop is the result of hard and excellent work of many others, reviewers and program committee members. We would like to express our sincere appreciation to all authors for their valuable contributions and to all program committee members and external reviewers for their cooperation in completing the workshop program under a very tight schedule. Last but not least, we thank Umit Catalyurek from Ohio State University, USA, the IPDPS 2013 Workshops Chair, for helping and encouraging the inclusion of PDSEC-13 in IPDPS 2013. 2013 IEEE 27th International Symposium on Parallel & Distributed Processing Workshops and PhD Forum