also take this opportunity to thank the National Science Founda­ tion (NSF) and the Army Research Office (ARO), whose financial support made the workshop possible. A vner Friedman Robert Gulliver v PREFACE The Workshop on Algorithms for Parallel Processing was held at the IMA September 16 - 20, 1996; it was the first workshop of the IMA year dedicated to the mathematics of high performance computing. The work­ shop organizers were Abhiram Ranade of The Indian Institute of Tech­ nology, Bombay, Michael Heath of the University of Illinois, and Robert Schreiber of Hewlett Packard Laboratories. Our idea was to bring together researchers who do innovative, exciting, parallel algorithms research on a wide range of topics, and by sharing insights, problems, tools, and methods to learn something of value from one another.