The term computation gap has been defined as the difference between the computational power demanded by the application domain and the computational power of the underlying computer platform. Traditionally, closing the computation gap has been one of the major and fundamental tasks of computer architects. However, as technology advances and computers become more pervasive in the society, the domain of computer architecture has been extended. The scope of research in the computer architecture is no longer restricted to the computer hardware and organization issues. A wide spectrum of topics ranging from algorithm design to power management is becoming part of the computer architecture. Based on the aforementioned trend and to reflect recent research efforts, attempts were made to select a collection of articles that covers different aspects of contemporary computer architecture design. This volume of the Advances in Computers contains six chapters on different aspects of computer architecture. Key features: - Wide range of research topics. - Coverage of new topics such as power management, Network on Chip, Load balancing in distributed systems, and pervasive computing. - Simple writing style.
A. R. Hurson is currently a professor and Chair of Computer Science department at Missouri S&T. Before joining Missouri S&T, he was a professor of Computer Science and Engineering department at The Pennsylvania State University. His research for the past 30 years has been directed toward the design and analysis of general as well as special purpose computer architectures. His research has been supported by NSF, DARPA, the Department of Education, the Air Force, the Office of Naval Research, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, NCR Corp., General Electric, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Pennsylvania State University, and Missouri S & T. He has published over 300 technical papers in areas including multidatabases, global information sharing and processing, application of mobile agent technology, object oriented databases, mobile and pervasive computing environment, sensor and ad-hoc networks, computer architecture and cache memory, parallel and distributed processing, dataflow architectures, and VLSI algorithms. Dr. Hurson served as the Guest Co-Editor of special issues of the IEEE Proceedings on Supercomputing Technology, the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing on Load Balancing and Scheduling, the journal of integrated computer-aided engineering on multidatabase and interoperable systems, IEEE Transactions on Computers on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques, Journal of Multimedia Tools and Applications, and Journal of Pervasive and Mobile Computing. He is the co-author of the IEEE Tutorials on Parallel Architectures for Database Systems, Multidatabase systems: An advanced solution for global information sharing, Parallel architectures for data/knowledge base systems, and Scheduling and Load Balancing in Parallel and Distributed Systems. He is also the guest Editor of advances in computers for Parallel, Distributed, and Pervasive Computing. Hurson is the Co-founder of the IEEE Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing (currently IPDPS) and IEEE conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications.
Professor Hurson has been active in various IEEE/ACM Conferences and has given tutorials and invited lectures for various conferences and organizations on global information sharing, database management systems, supercomputer technology, data/knowledge-based systems, dataflow processing, scheduling and load balancing, parallel computing, and Pervasive computing. He served as a member of the IEEE Computer Society Press Editorial Board, an IEEE Distinguished speaker, editor of IEEE transactions on computers, editor of Journal of Pervasive and Mobile Computing, and IEEE/ACM Computer Sciences Accreditation Board. Currently, he is serving as an ACM distinguished speaker, area editor CSI Journal of Computer Science and Engineering, and Co-Editor-in-Chief Advances in Computers.
