The purpose of Chuck Severence's book, High Performance Computing has always been to teach new programmers and scientists about the basics of High Performance Computing. This book is for learners with a basic understanding of modern computer architecture, not advanced degrees in computer engineering, as it is an easily understood introduction and overview of the topic.

Originally published by O'Reilly Media in 1998, the book has since gone out of print and has now been released under the Creative Commons Attribution License on Connexions.