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, 2011.

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 in particular the sections resources and Bibliography and further reading for useful pointers.

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 Mercurial (see Instructions for cloning the class repository).

The notes are being made freely available but are protected by copyright. As with anything you find on the web, if you quote from this work please give appropriate attribution.