Unlike conference proceeding, this book is a collection of papers that were presented at a Workshop, which are usually shorter in length and more focused on a specific area. This Workshop, 4th Austrian-Hungarian Workshop on Distributed and Parallel Systems, covered four specific, and yet very important aspects of Distributed and Parallel Computing:

1) Tools and techniques in Cluster Computing, which covered Load Balancing techniques, tools used for simulation and performance prediction, management tools used for abstraction of the underlying infrastructure

2) Global Grid Computing, which covered topics that concern large Grid management and Load Balancing in global Grids, dynamic resource discovery techniques and virtualization of resources to represent the user with a Single System Image (SSI)

3) Parallel Software Development techniques and tools, which covered the latest trends and available tools for developing applications for the gird, architectural techniques for caching, debugging techniques to shorten development time, and testing and deployment ideas for large grids.

4) Dependable and Fault-Tolerant Systems, which covered topics such as fault-tolerant techniques for storage systems, getting around the unpredictability of creating a fault tolerance distributed and parallel system, and failure detection and recovery techniques



As mentioned, the book/workshop does not try to cover everything under the sun, but what it does cover; it does so with applicable, useful and relevant papers. The researchers are basically presenting their own experiences and best-practices to the readers.



Even though the topics presented are academic for the most part, there are a number of ideas, techniques and tools that the reader can take away. One such tool is P-GRADE. There are three papers covering this tool in this book: two on load-balancing and one in software development and engineering. P-GRADE is a graphical tool that provides programming environment for developing parallel applications using graphical representation for communication, etc... It also has a number of tools for debugging, monitoring and visualization. The tool takes the graphical representation of your application, and develops C code for it, which could be compiled for any system. It is an open-source, free software and it is getting plenty of attention in Europe. The tool makes the complex task of developing software for a Grid Environment simpler, and even though it does not literally write the code for you, it will assist you where it can such as easing the pain of network programming and communication.



I highly recommend this book for architects, researches, professionals interested in papers that are not entirely research-based and there are applicable techniques that can be learned from them.