front matter
It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.
I could not have foreseen where this journey into parallel computing would take us. “Us” because the journey has been shared by numerous colleagues over the years. My journey into parallel computing began in the early 1990s, while I was at the University of New Mexico. I had written some compressible fluid dynamics codes to model shock tube experiments and was running these on every system I could get my hands on. As a result, I along with Brian Smith, John Sobolewski, and Frank Gilfeather, was asked to submit a proposal for a high performance computing center. We won the grant and established the Maui High Performance Computing Center in 1993. My part in the project was to offer courses and lead 20 graduate students in developing parallel computing at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.