Most of the papers in this volume were presented at the NATO Advanced
Research Workshop High Performance Computing: Technology and
Application, held in Cetraro, Italy from 24 to 26 of June, 1996. The
main purpose of the Workshop was to discuss some key scientific and
technological developments in high performance computing, identify
significant trends and defme desirable research objectives. The volume
structure corresponds, in general, to the outline of the workshop
technical agenda: general concepts and emerging systems, software
technology, algorithms and applications. One of the Workshop innovations
was an effort to extend slightly the scope of the meeting from
scientific/engineering computing to enterprise-wide computing. The
papers on performance and scalability of database servers, and Oracle
DBMS reflect this attempt We hope that after reading this collection of
papers the readers will have a good idea about some important research
and technological issues in high performance computing. We wish to give
our thanks to the NATO Scientific and Environmental Affairs Division for
being the principal sponsor for the Workshop. Also we are pleased to
acknowledge other institutions and companies that supported the
Workshop: European Union: European Commission DGIII-Industry, CNR:
National Research Council of Italy, University of Calabria, Alenia
Spazio, Centro Italiano Ricerche Aerospaziali, ENEA: Italian National
Agency for New Technology, Energy and the Environment, Fujitsu, Hewlett
Packard-Convex, Hitachi, NEC, Oracle, and Silicon Graphics-Cray
Research. Editors January 1997 vii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Ecole Nonnale
Su[rieure de Lyon, 69364 Abarbanel. Robert M.