Architectures Richard Copans

Two CD set. Both as 'solo' artists/bands and collaboratively, Cliff Richard and The Shadows have amassed more than 100 charting singles between them, as well as album sales upwards of ¼ Billion. Together they dominated the British popular music scene in the late '50s and early '60s with record-breaking careers that established their undisputed place in pop history. Between them they notched up 19 No.1 hits that included "Living Doll," "Travellin' Light," "Please Don't Tease," "Bachelor Boy," "Wonderful Land" and "Apache." In 2009, Cliff, together with Hank Marvin, Bruce Welch and Brian Bennett took to the stage again for their final tour - The Final Reunion - to celebrate their 50th anniversary, with an audience of more than 15,000. Released for the first time on CD, this 42-track set was recorded live at The O2 Arena in London.

Watching The Dark contains 3 CDs with 23 live, rare and unreleased tracks spanning the years 1969-1992. Also included is a 24-page booklet with photos, a complete biography and a selected discography. Includes liner notes by Greil Marcus, Joe Boyd and Leslie Berman. This three-disc set contains too many rarities and flouts chronology too blatantly to function as a simple best-of. Rather, it's an eclectic overview that dips deep enough into the archives to appeal to the hardcore fans that make up most of Thompson's audience while featuring enough classics to operate as a de facto "Greatest Hits" for those unfamiliar with the unjustly hitless guitarist/singer/songwriter. Previously unreleased live cuts display Thompson's unrivaled way with his axe ("Can't Win," "Calvary Cross"). Fans of Thompson's folkier side will delight at never-before heard traditional tunes like "Bogie's Bonnie Belle" and "Poor Wee Jockey Clarke." There are even some previously unheard Fairport tracks for those who've been in on Thompson's special gift from the very beginning. If you love Thompson, you must own this.

New Algorithms, Architectures and Applications for Reconfigurable Computing consists of a collection of contributions from the authors of some of the best papers from the Field Programmable Logic conference (FPL’03) and the Design and Test Europe conference (DATE’03). In all, seventy-nine authors, from research teams from all over the world, were invited to present their latest research in the extended format permitted by this special volume. The result is a valuable book that is a unique record of the state of the art in research into field programmable logic and reconfigurable computing.

The continuing reduction of feature sizes into the nanoscale regime has led to dramatic increases in transistor densities. Integration at these levels has highlighted the criticality of the on-chip interconnects. Network-on-Chip (NoC) architectures are viewed as a possible solution to burgeoning global wiring delays in many-core chips, and have recently crystallized into a significant research domain. On-chip networks instill a new flavor to communication research due to their inherently resource-constrained nature. Despite the lightweight character demanded of the NoC components, modern designs require ultra-low communication latencies in order to cope with inflating data bandwidths.

Despite five decades of research, parallel computing remains an exotic, frontier technology on the fringes of mainstream computing. Its much-heralded triumph over sequential computing has yet to materialize. This is in spite of the fact that the processing needs of many signal processing applications continue to eclipse the capabilities of sequential computing. The culprit is largely the software development environment. Fundamental shortcomings in the development environment of many parallel computer architectures thwart the adoption of parallel computing. Foremost, parallel computing has no unifying model to accurately predict the execution time of algorithms on parallel architectures. Cost and scarce programming resources prohibit deploying multiple algorithms and partitioning strategies in an attempt to find the fastest solution. As a consequence, algorithm design is largely an intuitive art form dominated by practitioners who specialize in a particular computer architecture. This, coupled with the fact that parallel computer architectures rarely last more than a couple of years, makes for a complex and challenging design environment.

The total of 145 full papers included in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 403 submissions. They cover the many dimensions of parallel algorithms and architectures including fundamental theoretical approaches, practical experimental projects, and commercial components and systems.