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\begin{opening}         
\title{Cluster Computing using High-Speed Networks \\              
Special Issue Guest Editorial}
\runningauthor{Sundar Vedantham}
\runningtitle{Cluster Computing using High-Speed Networks \\
Special Issue Guest Editorial}
\date{August 24, 2000}

\end{opening}           


Cluster-based computing has become an area of serious interest due to the 
availability of high-end workstation class processors and high-speed networks 
as commodity components. High performance computing over networked computers 
is increasingly gaining popularity leading to commodity supercomputing. 
Computer applications are increasingly making use of multimedia contents rich 
with data, voice and video. To support cluster computing with multimedia 
traffic, the networking architecture, which is at the backbone of cluster 
computing paradigm, needs to support efficient transportation of voice and 
video in addition to traditional data types at very high speed. Several high 
speed networking technologies that are capable of handling such requirements,
e.g., Myrinet, Gigabit Ethernet and ATM networks,
have emerged in the recent years. The aim of this special issue is to bring 
together original work from both academia and industry on issues related to 
cluster computing with high speed networks.

Out of all the submissions we received for this special issue, we have selected 
five papers that we thought will be of relevance to the researchers working 
in this area. The first paper entitled ``Information Retrieval on an SCI-Based 
PC Cluster'' discusses an information retrieval system implemented on a PC 
cluster with internet usage in mind. The authors observed a speed up of 500% 
when the performance of this efficient parallel processing model is compared 
to a traditional MPI-based information retrieval system.

``Object Clustering for High Performance Parallel Computing'' elaborates on a 
new parallel programming environment called DOVE aimed at cluster computing 
environments. The implementation provides an easy to use interface for the 
end users while exploiting the parallel working environment to the maximum.

``Asynchronous Transfer Mode and other Network Technologies for Wide Area and 
High Performance Cluster Computing'' shares the authors experiences in
constructing local and wide area clusters based on ATM networking. They discuss 
the DISCWorld problem solving environment created to handles large latencies 
encountered while workstations in a cluster are connected by WANs.

``Fault Tolerant Parallel Scheduling of Tasks on a Heterogeneous High 
Performance Workstation Cluster'' addresses the issue of task scheduling. 
Authors propose a new approach called Cluster Based Search that promises to 
exploit the synergy obtained in the clustered environment while attempting to 
solve the problem on hand.

Most of the cluster computing structures developed these days use Windows NT 
environment on Intel or Alpha processors, ``An Assessment of MPI Environment 
for Windows NT'' evaluates the characteristics of these two processor 
environments for MPI architecture. Paper presents several benchmark results.

Thus, in our opinion, the selected papers cover as broad a range of topics as 
possible within the area of cluster computing using high speed networks. We 
hope that the research community finds this special issue of use and interest. 
We would like to thank the editor of the Journal of Supercomputing, Dr. Hamid 
Arabnia for giving us an opportunity to edit this issue. We would also like to 
thank the referees listed at the end for their time and energy during the 
evaluation process.

On related front we are pleased to mention the formation of a IEEE Task Force 
on Cluster Computing (TFCC) due to growing interest in cluster computing. TFCC 
is acting as a focal point and guide to the current cluster computing community
and has been actively promoting the field of cluster computing with the aid of 
a number of novel projects. For example TFCC has an educational activity that 
has a book donation programme, holds forums for informal discussion, helps 
guide R\&D work both in academic and industrial settings through work-shops, 
symposiums and conferences. Further information on TFCC can be accessed from 
the Task Force web site: http://www.ieeetfcc.org
We hope you will find this special issue interesting. Happy reading!
\\ \\
{\bf Guest Editors}\\
{\bf Rajkumar Buyya} \\
School of Computer Science and Software Engineering \\
Monash University,\\
Caulfield Campus, Melbourne, Australia. \\
Email:  rajkumar@csse.monash.edu.au\\
URL: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/\~rajkumar\\
\\
{\bf Mahbub Hassan} \\ 
School of Computer Science and Engineering\\
University of New South Wales,\\
Sydney, Australia\\
Email: mahbub@cse.unsw.edu.au \\
URL: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/\~mahbub\\
\\
{\bf Sundararajan Vedantham}   \\
105 Peabody hall \\
Louisiana State University  \\
Baton Rouge, LA 70803, U.S.A  \\
Email: sundar@lsu.edu \\
URL: http://asterix.ednet.lsu.edu/\~sundar
\\ \\
{\bf Reviewers}
\begin{itemize}
\item Mark Baker, University of Portsmouth, UK.
\item Jim Basney, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.
\item Jo\~{a}o Carreira, Critical Software Lda, Portugal.
\item Giovanni Chiola, DISI, University of Genoa, Italy.
\item Toni Cort\'{e}s, Universitat Polit\`{e}cnica Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain.
\item Xing Du, Server Technologies, Oracle Corp. Redwood Shores, CA, USA.
\item Francesc Daniel Mu\~{n}oz i Esco\'{i}, Univ. Polit\`{e}cnica de 
Val\`{e}ncia, Spain.
\item Michael Factor, IBM Haifa Research Laboratory, Israel.
\item Dror Feitelson, Hebrew University, Israel.
\item Fritz Ferstl, Gridware GmbH, Germany.
\item Bertil Folliot, University Paris 6, France.
\item Victor M. Gulias, University of A Coru\~{n}a, Spain.
\item Daniel C. Hyde, Bucknell University, USA.
\item Elias G. Khalaf, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA.
\item JunSeong Kim, Intel Corporation, USA.
\item Orly Kremien, PROMPT-web, Israel.
\item Piyush Mehrotra, ICASE/NASA Langley Research Center, USA.
\item Jamshed H. Mirza, IBM Corp, New York, USA.
\item Andreas Moshovos, ECE Northwestern Univ., USA.
\item Natarajan Padmanaban, Microsoft Corporation, USA.
\item Hern\^{a}ni Pedroso, University of Coimbra, Portugal.
\item Sai Pinnepalli, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA.
\item Erich Schikuta, University of Vienna, Austria.
\item Rawn Shah, Independent Author/Technologist, USA.
\item Jo\~{a}o Gabriel Silva, Univ. Coimbra, Portugal.
\item Thomas Sterling, California Institute of Technology and NASA JPL, USA.
\item Yoshio Tanaka, Real World Computing Partnership, Japan.
\item Helmut Wanek, University ot Vienna, Austria.
\item Weilai Yang, Georgia Institute of Technology USA.
\end{itemize}

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