Parallel computers have become widely available in recent years. Many scientists are now using them to investigate the grand challenges of science, such as modeling global climate change, determining the masses of elementary particles from first principles, or sequencing the human genome. However, software for parallel computers has developed far more slowly than the hardware. Many incompatible programming systems exist, and many useful programming techniques are not widely known.Practical Parallel Programming provides scientists and engineers with a detailed, informative, and often critical introduction to parallel programming techniques. Following a review of the fundamentals of parallel computer theory and architecture, it describes four of the most popular parallel programming models in use today and shows how each can be used to solve various scientific and numerical problems.