This text contains selected papers from the International Symposium on High Performance Computational Science and Engineering that was help in France on August 27, 2004. This conference is focused on new research in algorithm, computational complexity and essentially problem solving using high-performance systems. Three topics in high-performance computation are covered in this text: distributed computing, numerical computation and computational applications.

The key note that needs to be mentioned is the fact that the papers covered in this text are engineering focused, and thus very applicable. In fact, the last section of this text, computational applications, are case studies from different researchers, each focusing on a specific application: image analysis for biological systems, satellite system optimization problem, optimization technique for Airline reservation and text classification in the World Wide Web using Neural Network. These papers represent real-world problems and applications of where the problems are very complex, and ingenuity is required to come up with an efficient algorithm to solve the problem at hand. The fact that problems are taken from the real world gives the reader a good sense of the overall picture of the text. I read this section on algorithms first, and then I went back to the other chapters of the text; this way I had a better appreciation of what the rest of the authors were talking about.

Distributed computing has been around for sometime now, but there are still complex problems surrounding distributed memory management that hunt the researchers. The first section of this text covers the main problems in distributed computing, and especially problems surrounding distributed shared memory. Another complex problem with distributed systems is the uncertainty of the overall static and dynamic performance of the system. Two papers cover this very complex topic, and given an insight of the available tools and techniques used for simulation and modeling of distributed systems.

Algorithms and related topics are covered in a section titled Numerical Computations. Three papers are selected that focus on optimization of currently in place algorithms such as the Poisson equation, extraction of zeros in large analytic functions and optimizing the sparse Cholesky factorization.

All and all, this text covers two important topics in high-performance computation. The section on applications reels in the topic at hand. The editors did a great job selecting the right papers to be published in this text.