Preface

Scalable computing and communications includes environments such as autonomic, cloud, cluster, distributed, energy-aware, parallel, peer-to-peer, green, grid, and utility computing environments. The aforementioned paradigms are necessary to promote collaboration between entities and resources, which are necessary and beneficial to complex scientific, industrial, and business applications, which include weather forecasting, computational biology, telemedicine, drug synthesis, vehicular technology, design and fabrication, finance, and simulations. Therefore, scalable computing is at the heart of all complex applications.

Scalable computing and communications involves the use of computing facilities, which can readily adapt to the demands of more powerful computing and communication capabilities. Scalability is a desirable property for many scientific, industrial, and business applications. Moreover, scalability is also an important feature for hardware, as a computing facility can be scaled as and when there is a need to add computing and communication modules.

There have been great developments and advances in the aforementioned research fields. It is thus a good time to gather current progress in research in a book collection in order to document research achievements and to identify future directions.

To that end, this book on scalable computing and communications presents, discusses, and shares ideas, results, and experiences regarding recent important advances and future challenges. The compiled work ranges from theory to practice, software to hardware, and concepts to prototypes.

We sincerely hope that you will enjoy this compilation, which is hoped to cater to a wide audience.

SAMEE U. KHAN

North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND

ALBERT Y. ZOMAYA

University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

LIZHE WANG

Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China