Most of the papers in this volume were presented at the NATO Advanced Research Workshop High Performance Computing: Technology and Application, held in Cetraro, Italy from 24 to 26 of June, 1996. The main purpose of the Workshop was to discuss some key scientific and technological developments in high performance computing, identify significant trends and defme desirable research objectives. The volume structure corresponds, in general, to the outline of the workshop technical agenda: general concepts and emerging systems, software technology, algorithms and applications. One of the Workshop innovations was an effort to extend slightly the scope of the meeting from scientific/engineering computing to enterprise-wide computing. The papers on performance and scalability of database servers, and Oracle DBMS reflect this attempt We hope that after reading this collection of papers the readers will have a good idea about some important research and technological issues in high performance computing. We wish to give our thanks to the NATO Scientific and Environmental Affairs Division for being the principal sponsor for the Workshop. Also we are pleased to acknowledge other institutions and companies that supported the Workshop: European Union: European Commission DGIII-Industry, CNR: National Research Council of Italy, University of Calabria, Alenia Spazio, Centro Italiano Ricerche Aerospaziali, ENEA: Italian National Agency for New Technology, Energy and the Environment, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard-Convex, Hitachi, NEC, Oracle, and Silicon Graphics-Cray Research. Editors January 1997 vii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Ecole Nonnale Su rieure de Lyon, 69364 Abarbanel. Robert M.