This book contains 23 papers from the Austrian-Hungarian Workshop on Distributed and Parallel Systems (DAPSYS), held in Budapest in 2004. DAPSYS is an international conference series, with biannual meetings dedicated to general aspects of distributed and parallel systems.

The papers in the book are organized into six parts. Part 1 contains papers describing grid environments, like the JGrid system, a Java/Jini based service-oriented grid system, or the Virtual Laboratory VL-E, a Grid-enabled system to support the development of e-science applications.

Part 2 considers different aspects of cluster technology, like the realization of message passing interface input/output (MPI-I/O) operations with the Stampi library, or the execution of MPI applications in wireless networks. This part also contains a comparison of message passing and virtual shared memory systems, based on different benchmarks, and an approach for programming symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) clusters.

Part 3 is dedicated to programming tools supporting the development of parallel and distributed applications. Two of the papers in this part are based on the parallel grid runtime application development environment (P-GRADE) for the development and execution of parallel applications on cluster and grid systems. The papers describe debugging techniques and checkpointing mechanisms for P-GRADE. The other two papers in this part describe the high-performance program analysis tool Vampir Next Generation (VNG), and the debugging wizard DeWiz, for monitoring program activities.

Part 4 is completely devoted to the P-GRADE environment, describing different aspects, such as the graphical interface for program design. Three of the four papers discuss the development of application programs from different areas using the P-GRADE system, including a quantum scattering code, a traffic simulation, and a reaction-diffusion simulation from chemistry.

Part 5 describes applications of grid systems, including e-commerce solutions, distributed multimedia servers, and distributed flight simulation. Part 6 contains support algorithms for different aspects of grid systems, like synchronization issues, garbage collection, and optimization techniques.

Apart from the short preface, there is no introduction to the topic of cluster or grid computing, or to the different parts of the book. Thus, the book is merely intended to be a collection of papers, and is especially suited for expert readers who already have a background in the topic, and who are interested in specific aspects addressed by the different papers.

There is a clear focus on the P-GRADE environment, since six of the 23 papers are based on this approach, and consider different aspects of its realization or use.