Starting at the beginning of 1997, the journal aims to publish on the Web high quality, peer reviewed, original scientific papers alongside review articles and short notes in the rapidly developing area of performance evaluation and modelling of computer systems with special emphasis on high performance computing.

The rush for higher and higher performance has always been one of the main goals of electronic computers. Currently, high performance computing is moving rapidly from an era of `Big Iron' to a future that will be dominated by systems built from commodity components. Very soon, users will be able to construct high-performance systems by clustering off-the-shelf processing modules using widely available high-speed communication switches. Alternatively, the World Wide Web itself represents the largest available `parallel' computer, with more than 20 million potential nodes worldwide. This makes the innovative Web technologies particularly attractive for distributed computing. Equally exciting is the goal to achieving Petaflop computing rates on real production codes.

All this makes the performance evaluation and modelling of emerging hybrid shared/distributed memory parallel architectures with complex memory hierarchies and corresponding applications a natural area of priority for science, research and development.

The main objectives of this journal are, therefore, to provide a focus for performance evaluation activities and to establish a flexible environment on the Web for reporting and discussing performance modelling and Petaflop computing. The Electronic Journal will concentrate on computer performance evaluation and modelling and will include areas such as:

© 1997 The University of Southampton