Ibm Lyngby

History of Nordic Computing

Computing in the Nordic countries started in late 1940s mainly as an engineering activity to build computing devices to perform mathematical calculations and assist mathematicians and engineers in scientific problem solving. The early computers of the Nordic countries emerged during the 1950s and had names like BARK, BESK, DASK, SMIL, SARA, ESKO, and NUSSE. Each of them became a nucleus in institutes and centres for mathematical computations programmed and used by highly qualified professionals. However, one should not forget the punched-card machine technology at this time that had existed for several decades. In addition, we have a Nordic name, namely Frederik Rosing Bull, contributing to the fundaments of punched card technology and forming the French company Bull. Commercial products such as FACIT EDB and SAAB D20-series computers in Sweden, the Danish GIER computer, the Nokia MIKKO computer in Finland, as well as the computers of Norsk Data in Norway followed the early computers. In many cases, however, companies and institutions did not further develop or exploit Nordic computing hardware, even though it exhibited technical advantages. Consequently, in the 1970s, US computers, primarily from IBM, flooded the Nordic market.

Structures and Operations in Engineering and Management Systems

Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics, PPAM 2007, held in Gdansk, Poland, in September 2007. The 63 revised full papers of the main conference presented together with 85 revised workshop papers were carefully reviewed and selected from over 250 initial submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on parallel/distributed architectures and mobile computing, numerical algorithms and parallel numerics, parallel and distributed non-numerical algorithms, environments and tools for as well as applications of parallel/distributed/grid computing, evolutionary computing, meta-heuristics and neural networks. The volume proceeds with the outcome of 11 workshops and minisymposia dealing with novel data formats and algorithms for dense linear algebra computations, combinatorial tools for parallel sparse matrix computations, grid applications and middleware, large scale computations on grids, models, algorithms and methodologies for grid-enabled computing environments, scheduling for parallel computing, language-based parallel programming models, performance evaluation of parallel applications on large-scale systems, parallel computational biology, high performance computing for engineering applications, and the minisymposium on interval analysis.