This book examines the present and future of soft computer techniques. It explains how to use the latest technological tools, such as multicore processors and graphics processing units, to implement highly efficient intelligent system methods using a general purpose computer.

This volume contains the proceedings of an international conference on high performance scientific and engineering computing held in Munich in March 1998 and organized by FORTWIHR, the Bavarian Consortium for High Performance Scientific Computing. The 38 contributions cover engineering applications for numerical simulation from the fields fluid flow, optimal control, crystal growth and semiconductor technology, as well as numerical simulation in astrophysics or quantum chemistry. In contrast to related collections, the reader gets a really interdisciplinary spectrum of the state of the art of selected topics of scientific computing with recent results of research groups from applied mathematics, computer science, engineering, physics and chemistry.

"The central part of the conference focused on research goals and priorities in : high-performance architectures, algorithms and theory, artificial intelligence, systems and software, neural networks, computer-based collaboration"--intro., p. 2