Parallel Scientific Computing in C and MPI With CD or Joystick Nation

Parallel Scientific Computing in C++ and MPI / With CD

Author: George Karniadakis

This book provides a seamless approach to numerical algorithms, modern programming techniques and parallel computing. These concepts and tools are usually taught serially across different courses and different textbooks, thus observing the connection between them. The necessity of integrating these subjects usually comes after such courses are concluded (e.g., during a first job or a thesis project), thus forcing the student to synthesize what is perceived to be three independent subfields into one in order to produce a solution. The book includes both basic and advanced topics and places equal emphasis on the discretization of partial differential equations and on solvers. Advanced topics include wavelets, high-order methods, non-symmetric systems and parallelization of sparse systems. A CD-ROM accompanies the text.

Table of Contents:

1. Scientific computing and simulation science;
2. Basic concepts;
3. Approximations;
4. Roots and integrals;
5. Explicit discretizations;
6. Implicit discretizations;
7. Relaxation: discretization and solvers;
8. Propagation: numerical diffusion and dispersion;
9. Fast linear solvers;
10. Fast eigensolvers; Appendix A: C++ basics; Appendix B: MPI basics; Bibliography.

Interesting textbook: JavaScript or Explanation Based Neural Network Learning

Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts and Rewired Our Minds

Author: J C Herz

J.C. Hertz brings us the first popular history and critique of electronic entertainment from its genesis as primitive blips in the labs of Cold War computer programmers to the studios where networked 3-D theme parks are created. Tracing this neon branch of the computer industry from a small cadre of inspired nerds to an entertainment behemoth that rivals Hollywood box office billings, she brings to life the history of Space Invaders, Pac Man, Super Mario, Myst, Doom, and other celebrated games. She explores the culture of virtual construction workers who "do code" wherever the next big game is being created - and the world of designers, writers, and musicians who make their living in this boomtown industry. At the same time, Herz investigates the games themselves and the role they have come to play in an increasingly virtual world.

Publishers Weekly

As much as Herz's (Surfing the Internet) new book is an enthusiastic and diligently researched history of, as she puts it, "the evolution of videogames from blips to behemoths," it is also an engaging exploration of "the human drive to play." Herz describes how that drive has persisted and developed in response to wave upon wave of technological refinement. She begins with a time line that plots the growth of the interactive entertainment from 1962, when an MIT electrical engineer created Spacewar, a videogame that scientists across the county copied and installed in university computer systems across the country, to today's $6-billion-a-year global industry. Especially intriguing are the interspersed profiles of the behind-the-scenes programmers who start out tinkering with code, become obsessed with a new game form and wind up millionaires. Only fellow gamers will share Herz's adulation for some of these programmers ("I've never been starstruck. Until now. I can't believe. I'm actually talking to the guy who wrote Defender," she writes), but most readers will be fascinatedand some concernedby the sense of generations being formed and changed by this latest collision of entertainment and a technology that, unlike TV, film and music, has been designed primarily for solitary consumption. (June)

Kirkus Reviews

Here is a look at an essential part of American youth that goes beyond a mere chronicle to engage all of the political, social, and cultural implications of video games.

Herz (Surfing the Internet, 1995) eschews a historical point of view for a free-associating meditation on the video game culture that, by her calculations, has engulfed one-fifth of our population. Of course, not being able to dispense with the historical aspects of her subject entirely, Herz offers up "A Natural History of Videogames" timeline: The first video game was actually created in 1962 by some MIT graduate students; thus, Herz notes, "If the history of videogames were a twenty-four-hour day, Pong would arise at 6:37 a.m." And in tracing the trajectory from Pong to Doom, she evokes such "classics" as Q*Bert, Space Invaders, and Pole Position. Equally clever is her sardonic suggestion to right-wing critics of video game violence that they turn it to their advantage with an "Operation Rescue level of Doom, where you gun down abortion doctors" or even a video game version of an all-out military operation. "But, then," she remarks, "been there, played that. Gulf War." (Anyway, she observes that in most video games, the violence is perpetrated by teenage boys and girls playing, not criminals, but law-enforcement officers.) Herz adroitly examines the gender gap in video game development, citing political feminists' scholarly critiques of Ms. Pac Man and Frogger, and her research shines in her strong study of characterization in video games, as she traces the connections between Japanese comic-book anime and the popularity of a certain Italian-American plumber named Mario.

This otherwise smart and entertaining read ends a bit too abruptly during a discussion of how computer simulation approximates reality. Nevertheless, Joystick Nation will please its citizenry.