Achieving high performance in numerical computations on RISC workstations and parallel systems

The nominal peak speeds of both serial and parallel computers is raising rapidly. At the same time however it is becoming increasingly difficult to get out a significant fraction of this high peak speed from modern computer architectures. In this tutorial the authors give the scientists and engineers involved in numerically demanding calculations and simulations the necessary basic knowledge to write reasonably efficient programs. The basic principles are rather simple and the possible rewards large. Writing a program by taking into account optimization techniques related to the computer architecture can significantly speedup your program, often by factors of 10--100. As such, optimizing a program can for instance be a much better solution than buying a faster computer. If a few basic optimization principles are applied during program development, the additional time needed for obtaining an efficient program is practically negligible. In-depth optimization is usually only needed for a few subroutines or kernels and the effort involved is therefore also acceptable