Advancement of Science and Technology and its impact on the real life applications is more and more strictly related to the progress and availability of high performance parallel computer systems and Grids, the novel networked infrastructures aimed to organize and optimize the use of a huge amount of distributed data processing and computing resources.

The book collects in four chapters a selection of papers presented at the 2006 International Advanced Research Workshop on High Performance Computing and Grids in Cetraro, Italy; these papers are related to some fundamental advances in parallel computer systems and their future developments and to the establishment and evolution of Grids fundamentals, implementation, deployment.

The aim is to cover different points of view in the field by actors playing different roles, to orchestrate and correlate their interconnection and coherence, and – above all – to show behaviours, impacts, performances of architectures, systems, services and organizations in action.

Accordingly the expected audience would be broad, mainly made up by computer scientists, graduate students, post doc researchers, specialists of computing and data centers, computer engineers and architects, project leaders, information system planners, professional technologists.

The book structure will help the reader to accomplish the objective mentioned above. An introductory monograph by I. Foster discusses the general and appealing issue on when and how to advance the state of the art in scientific software and infrastructure. Chapters 1 and 2 deal with some fundamental topics on High Performance Computing and Grids. Chapter 3 surveys different aspects of Grid Computing use, in particular tools and services for making available and deployable grids. Chapter 4 deals with applications; these in general are an indispensable motivation for researching and developing new fields of science and related technologies.

It is my pleasure thanking and acknowledging the contribution of many individuals that have made this book possible.

Gerhard Joubert, the Editor of the IOS Press book series “Advances in Parallel Computing” which now includes this volume, for his support, encouragement and advice on editorial issues and for writing the Foreword.

Jack Dongarra, Ian Foster, Geoffrey Fox, Miron Livny, among others, for advising on scientific issues before, during and after the workshop organization.

My colleagues from the Center of Excellence on High Performance Computing and the Department of Electronics, Informatics and Systems at University of Calabria, Italy are thanked for their constructive comments.

I feel indebted to Maria Teresa Guaglianone for her dedication in handling the book's material and for keeping, nicely and effectively, relationships with the contributing Authors and the Publisher.

Finally, the support of Hewlett Packard towards the book publication is acknowledged and in particular the persistent consideration and help given by Frank Baetke.

Lucio Grandinetti

Professor and Director, Center of Excellence on High Performance Computing University of Calabria, Italy