.. _about:

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About these notes -- important disclaimers
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These note on high performance scientific computing are being developed for
the course `Applied Mathematics <http://www.amath.washington.edu/>`_ `483/583
<http://www.amath.washington.edu/courses/583-spring-2011/index.html>`_ 
at the `University of Washington
<http://www.washington.edu>`_, 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 :ref:`resources` and :ref:`biblio` 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 :ref:`sphinx`) and the input
files are available using Mercurial (see :ref:`classhg`).

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.