Preface

The parallel and distributed computing is an exciting paradigm that provides computing and communication services for data and/or computation-intensive applications. Large vari‐ eties of devices and systems can be accessed for effective parallel and distributed comput‐ ing. We can easily use general purpose graphic processing unit (GPU) for high-speed computation. Cluster or cloud technologies and systems are the effective alternatives. Em‐ bedded systems and Internet of things technology may also be beneficial for the implemen‐ tation of distributed systems. The proliferation of parallel and distributed systems further spurs the demand for data-intensive and/or computation-intensive applications. This emer‐ gence is an outcome of research and technological advances in computer architectures, soft‐ ware, and network.

In this book, chapters that would capture cutting-edge research activity in new parallel and distributed computing technologies are solicited. These chapters introduce new studies in the fields of computer applications, architectures, software, and network for parallel and distributed computing. We believe that all of these chapters are of very high quality and can also stimulate future research innovations in this area.

This book is organized as follows. The first chapter provides an overview of this book. Chapters 2 and 3 present new algorithms and models for the applications of social network and grid computing, respectively. The studies on GPU are discussed in Chapter 4. The final two chapters focus on the software implementation and evaluation.

I would like to thank all recruited authors for their scholarly contributions. I am also grate‐ ful to InTech staff for publishing this book and especially to Ms. Nina Kalinic, for her kind assistance throughout the editing process. Without them, this book would not be possible. Finally, on behalf of all the authors, I hope that the readers will benefit in many ways from reading this book.

> **Wen-Jyi Hwang** Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering National Taiwan Normal University Taipei, Taiwan
