High Performance Scientific and Engineering Computing

Since the creation of the term "e;Scientific Computing"e; and of its German counterpart "e;Wissenschaftliches Rechnen"e; (whoever has to be blamed for that), scientists from outside the field have been confused about the some- what strange distinction between scientific and non-scientific computations. And the insiders, i. e. those who are, at least, convinced of always comput- ing in a very scientific way, are far from being happy with this summary of their daily work, even if further characterizations like "e;High Performance"e; or "e;Engineering"e; try to make things clearer - usually with very modest suc- cess, however. Moreover, to increase the unfortunate confusion of terms, who knows the differences between "e;Computational Science and Engineering"e; , as indicated in the title of the series these proceedings were given the honour to be published in, and "e;Scientific and Engineering Computing"e;, as chosen for the title of our book? Actually, though the protagonists of scientific com- puting persist in its independence as a scientific discipline (and rightly so, of course), the ideas behind the term diverge wildly. Consequently, the variety of answers one can get to the question "e;What is scientific computing?"e; is really impressive and ranges from the (serious) "e;nothing else but numerical analysis"e; up to the more mocking "e;consuming as much CPU-time as possible on the most powerful number crunchers accessible"e; .

Since the creation of the term "e;Scientific Computing"e; and of its German counterpart "e;Wissenschaftliches Rechnen"e; (whoever has to be blamed for that), scientists from outside the field have been confused about the some- what strange distinction between scientific and non-scientific computations. And the insiders, i. e. those who are, at least, convinced of always comput- ing in a very scientific way, are far from being happy with this summary of their daily work, even if further characterizations like "e;High Performance"e; or "e;Engineering"e; try to make things clearer - usually with very modest suc- cess, however. Moreover, to increase the unfortunate confusion of terms, who knows the differences between "e;Computational Science and Engineering"e; , as indicated in the title of the series these proceedings were given the honour to be published in, and "e;Scientific and Engineering Computing"e;, as chosen for the title of our book? Actually, though the protagonists of scientific com- puting persist in its independence as a scientific discipline (and rightly so, of course), the ideas behind the term diverge wildly. Consequently, the variety of answers one can get to the question "e;What is scientific computing?"e; is really impressive and ranges from the (serious) "e;nothing else but numerical analysis"e; up to the more mocking "e;consuming as much CPU-time as possible on the most powerful number crunchers accessible"e; .