About these notes – important disclaimers

These note on high performance scientific computing are being developed for the course Applied Mathematics 483/583 at the University of Washington, Spring Quarter, 2013.

They are very much a work in progress. Many pages are not yet here and the ones that are will mostly be modified and supplemented as the quarter progresses.

It is not intended to be a complete textbook on the subject, by any means. The goal is to get the student started with a few key concepts and techniques and then encourage further reading elsewhere. So it is a collection of brief introductions to various important topics with pointers to books, websites, and other references for more details. See the Bibliography and further reading for more references and other suggested readings.

There are many pointers to Wikipedia pages sprinkled through the notes and in the bibliography, simply because these pages often give a good overview of issues without getting into too much detail. They are not necessarily definitive sources of accurate information.

These notes are mostly written in Sphinx (see Sphinx documentation) and the input files are available using git (see Instructions for cloning the class repository).

License

These notes are being made freely available and are released under the Creative Commons CC BY license. This means that you are welcome to use them and quote from them as long as you give appropriate attribution.

Of course you should always do this with any material you find on the web or elsewhere, provided you are allowed to reuse it at all.

You should also give some thought to licensing issues whenever you post your own work on the web, including computer code. Whether or not you want others to be able to make use of it for various purposes, make your intentions known.