Distributed and Parallel Systems: Cluster and Grid Computing is the proceedings of the fourth Austrian-Hungarian Workshop on Distributed and Parallel Systems organized jointly by Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria and the MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute.

The papers in this volume cover a broad range of research topics presented in four groups. The first one introduces cluster tools and techniques, especially the issues of load balancing and migration. Another six papers deal with grid and global computing including grid infrastructure,...

The field of parallel computing dates back to the mid-fifties, where research labs started the development of so-called supercomputers with the aim to significantly increase the performance, mainly the number of (floating point) operations a machine is able to perform per unit of time. Since then, significant advances in hardware and software technology have brought the field to a point where the long-time challenge of tera-flop computing was reached in 1998. While increases in performance are still a driving factor in parallel and distributed processing, there are many other challenges to be...