ABSTRACT
In this chapter we provide a brief introduction to parallel computer architecture. The intent of this material is to provide a survey of the principal features of computer architectures that are most relevant to performance, and to briefly define concepts and terminology that will be used in the remainder of this book. Obviously there is substantial literature on the topic of computer architectures in general, and even on the subtopic of computer architectures within the realm of high-performance computing. Thus, we can only provide a sampling here. For additional details, please see the excellent references [104,164,268].
