Introduction to special issue on high performance computing

This special issue of Springer Computing journal provides a forum for presenting advances of current research and development in different aspects of high performance computing. With the rapid growth in computing and communications technology, the past decadehaswitnessed aproliferationof powerful parallel anddistributed systems and an ever-increasing demand for practice of high performance computing,which hasmoved into the mainstream of computing and has become a key technology in determining future research and development activities in many academic and industrial branches, especially when the solution of large and complex problems must cope with very tight timing schedules. This special issue aims to present and discuss advances of current research and development in many aspects of high performance computing. This special issue contains papers selected from a set of invited papers presented at the 14th IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC-2012) or the associated workshops, held in Liverpool, UK, June 26–28, 2012. The objective of HPCC 2012 was to provide a forum for scientists and engineers in academia and industry to exchange and discuss their experiences, new ideas, research results, and applications about all aspects of high performance