Thomas Sterling is Professor of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. He serves as the Executive Associate Director of the Center for Research in Extreme Scale Technologies (CREST) and as its Chief Scientist. He is most widely known for his pioneering work in commodity cluster computing as leader of the Beowulf Project for which he and colleagues were awarded the Gordon Bell Prize. Professor Sterling currently leads a team of researchers at IU to enable a new generation of extreme scale computing systems and applications. He is the co-author of six books and holds six patents. He has taught a graduate level course upon which this textbook will be heavily informed, five times.