Choice Review

Desrochers provides a unified treatment of the architecture of both the conventional serial and the modern parallel computers. His book is divided into three sections. Section 1 describes the basic building blocks of an architecture, factors that determine the hardware speed and the role and nature of system software. It also provides a discussion of the well-known taxonomies of parallel architectures. Section 2, the core of this work, describes the standard approaches to parallelism in computer architecture and the standard tools for performance modeling. A number of case studies are given in Section 3, including a discussion of Illiac IV, Staran, CM*, and the massively parallel processor, Intel Hypercube. There are more than 400 references and a useful glossary of important terms spanning some 25 pages. There is also a listing of the standard LINPACK program for solving linear systems using LV decomposition. Although there are no exercises given, the book could well be used for a seminar course for senior/first year graduate students and as a reference source.-S. Lakshmivarahan, University of Oklahoma