Special Issue: Advances in High‐Performance Computing and Communications

High-performance computing and communications has been an important and fundamental research topic over the past decade and has posed many challenging problems. Researchers and industrial professionals have been devoted to designing innovative tools and techniques to keep up with the rapid evolution and increasing complexity of large and complex scientific and engineering problems. This special issue contains seven extended and revised papers which were mainly selected from the 10th IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC-08) in Dalian, China, September 25–27, 2008. The purpose of the conference was to provide a forum for engineers and scientists in academia and industry to present and discuss their novel ideas, new research results, applications, experiences, work-in-progress, and state-of-the-art techniques in the area of high-performance computing and communications. The extended versions of these papers were carefully peer-reviewed according to the practice of this journal. The selected papers deal with a wide range of important aspects and challenging issues of high-performance computing and networking systems and the contents are built on analytical modeling, experimental and simulation studies. The contributions of these papers are outlined below. Dispatching a large number of jobs directly to a small number of physical servers requires much runtime information and computation in order to make the distributed computing system efficient and scalable. Choi et al. 1 presented a two-level indirect dispatching framework that dispatches requests to servers through virtual machines (VMs), called Dispatching Requests Indirectly through Virtual Environment (DRIVE). They set up an experimental environment consisting of a personal computer (PC) cluster and four benchmark suites to demonstrate the effectiveness of the DRIVE framework. The experimental results have shown that the use of VMs indeed abstracts away the client requests and hence helps to improve the overall performance of a dynamically changing computing environment. Virtualization is being widely deployed now as an emerging trend. Liao et al. 2 proposed a Lightweight Virtual Desktop (LVD) management architecture to combine the virtualization technology and inexpensive PCs. They implemented LVD in the cluster with VMs and compared the performance of LVD prototype system with those of the currently used desktop systems, including Microsoft Remote Desktop, Citrix MetaFrameXP and Sun Ray. The experimental results have shown that the LVD performs well in its functions improving the response time while decreasing the power consumptions. The workload characteristics and resource usage patterns of available applications are critical for the design and development of hardware and software stacks of future machines. Seelam et al. 3 presented a comprehensive workload performance characterization of three large-scale applications, i.e. Hybrid Coordinate Ocean Model, Parallel Ocean Program, and Lattice Boltzemann Magneto-Hydrodynamics Code, using timers and performance counters available on Power5+ chip. On the basis of the experimental results, they have described the sources of load imbalances in the applications and identified the potential impediments to the scalability of the applications under large processor counts. Communication through relay channels has received considerable research interests due to their ability of creating diversity and consequently improving the robustness of data transmission for ubiquitous computing and networking applications. Zhang et al. 4 presented the theoretical model and the implementation of two relaying algorithms, dynamic relaying and fixed relaying, in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with a couple of relay nodes and investigated the performance of relay channels in terms of diversity gain and throughput. The experimental results have shown that the data throughput between the source node and the destination node is enhanced by the presence of the relay nodes. Moreover, the results have revealed the performance trade-offs between diversity and energy efficiency. Multipath routing protocols can potentially enhance the network robustness significantly to repudiation attacks. Yin et al. 5 proposed a novel Secure Multipath Routing Protocol with authentication mechanism for Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) to extensively defense the various attacks. Extensive analysis and experiments have demonstrated that the proposed schemes can effectively secure MANETs, yet incur very low communication and computation overhead. Attacks and defense are prevalent in the current Internet. The modeling of Internet traffic has been a critical task in the design of network architectures. Xiang et al. 6 presented a microscopic competition model to analyze the dynamics among the nodes, i.e. benign or malicious. The NS2 simulation results have proven that the model can well describe the competition behavior among normal users and attackers. According to this model, they proposed an anomaly attack detection method based on the Adaptive Reasons Theory (ART) neural network. The experiments have shown that the proposed model can effectively detect Distributed Denial of Service attacks. Target tracking is typically a thought-provoking application in WSNs. Wang et al. 7 proposed a two-level Cooperative and Energy-efficient Tracking (CET) algorithm that reduces energy consumption by requiring only a minimum number of sensor nodes to participate in communication, transaction and perform sensing for target tracking in WSNs. Performance analysis and simulation studies have demonstrated that CET improves target capturing speed and outperforms some existing protocols of target tracking with energy saving under certain ideal situations. We express our deep thanks to the Editor-in-Chief, Professor Geoffrey Fox, for providing us with the opportunity to host this special issue in Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience. We also thank the authors for their contributions, including those whose papers were not included. Last but not least, we thank the thoughtful work of the many reviewers who provided invaluable evaluations and recommendations.

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