1 Introduction

During the last decades, many researchers in cluster and grid computing community have been devoted to developing new and efficient algorithms and architectures for cluster and grid computing. The effort has resulted in advances in new paradigms for high performance computing systems such as cluster computing and grid computing. Nevertheless, there are still many research issues need to be addressed in the arena of cluster computing and grid computing.

This special issue invites high quality contributions addressing theoretical and practical problems in various aspects of cluster computing and grid computing, including parallel algorithms and architectures, encompassing fundamental theoretical approaches, practical experimental projects, and commercial components and systems.

Six manuscripts were finally selected for this special issue after the first, second review processes. Each manuscript selected was blindly reviewed by at least three reviewers consisting of guest editors and external reviewers.

In the following, we present a brief overview on each manuscript.

2 Overview

The first paper entitled “High Performance Web Server Architecture with Kernel-level Caching,” by Choi et al. proposed a solution for higher performance web service by caching dynamic data using content separation between static and dynamic portions. Also, they tried to improve some drawbacks of kHTTPd implementation such as copying data redundantly, synchronous write, and processing only static data.

The second paper entitled “Performance Implications of Non-uniform VCPU-PCPU Mapping in Virtualization Environment,” by Zhong et al. focused on understanding the performance implications of the non-uniform VCPU-PCPU mapping in a virtualization system. They also demonstrated that the presence of the non-uniform mapping has negative impacts on application’s performance predictability.

Another paper in this special issue, entitled “A Dynamic Approach to Tolerate Soft Errors,” by Xiong et al. proposed a new dynamic software-based approach, which is implemented by the technique dynamic binary instrumentation, to tolerate soft errors. Also they demonstrated that their approach can get higher reliability of dynamic software than those approaches which is implemented with static program protection method.

The fourth paper entitled “An Integrated Approach towards Aggressive State-Tracking Migration for Maximizing Performance Benefit in Distributed Computing,” by Yong-Hyuk Moon et al. presented a new state-tracking migration scheme that is integrated with aggressive reservation strategies such as immediate restart, greedy backfilling and selective preemption. The main contribution of this paper is an analysis of the effects of three techniques that can be used beyond the conventional migration schemes.

The fifth paper entitled “A Hierarchical Parallel Discrete Event Simulation Kernel for Multicore Platform,” by Wenjie Tang et al. tried to outline a simple Virtual coordinate system (VCS) for wireless sensor network that does not rely on multiple anchors. They showed that the new VCS is efficient in helping to guarantee delivery, since it assigns, to each sensor-node, a unique identity.

The final paper entitled “Real-Time Low Bitrate Multimedia Communication For Smart Spaces and Wireless Sensor Networks,” by Kannan et al. developed a new effective extended hyper tangent version of fuzzy c-means with effective cluster center initialization for getting meaningful structure in noise data clustering or data analyzing in real world problems in order to overcome the said disadvantage of standard fuzzy c-means.