The biennial research workshop on High Performance Computing was held in Cetraro in July 2018. The papers presented during the workshop covered a wide spectrum of topics on new developments in the rapidly evolving supercomputing field. A selection of contributions presented at the workshop are included in this volume. In addition two papers presented at a workshop on Brain Inspired Computing in 2017 are also included. An overview of work related to Data Science, executed by a number of universities in the USA, and of which parts were presented at the 2018 as well as previous workshops, is also included.

That the applicability of Moore’s conjecture must be limited in its time span due to physical limitations was known from the outset. On the one hand this resulted already in the 1970s in the development of parallel computers, which followed the idea that many processors working on the same problem may in some cases, at least, significantly reduce the time to solution. Initially parallel processors were special designs, such as vector processors, catering for particular algorithm paradigms. These specialised machines were expensive due to their limited numbers. It was the realisation that the use of COTS (Components Off The Shelf) could reduce costs that started the evolution of the massively parallel systems available today. The main problem with such systems was the development of suitable operating systems, algorithms and application software.

The position today is that systems comprising millions of processors are limited in the applications they can efficiently solve, due to the restrictions in developing suitable parallel application software. This triggered a number of developments in order to develop alternate compute paradigms that may offer alternate approaches to solving complex and compute intensive problems. Two of these are Quantum Computers (QC) and Brain Inspired Computers (BIC).

In this book a number of papers discussing various possibilities of such new approaches to computing are included.

Lucio Grandinetti, Italy

Gerhard Joubert, Germany

Kristel Michielsen, Germany

Seyedeh Leili Mirtaheri, Iran

Michela Taufer, USA

Rio Yokota, Japan

Date: 2019-06-15