Message from the PDSEC-17 Workshop Chairs Peter Strazdins § , Keita Teranishi ∗∗ , Rapha¨ el Couturier ∗ , Joseph Antony ¶ , Thomas Rauber † , Gudula R¨ unger ‡ , Laurence T. Yang ‖ . § The Australian National University, Australia ∗∗ Sandia National Laboratories, USA ∗ Univ. Bourgogne Franche-Comt´ e, France ¶ National Computational Infrastructure, Australia † University of Bayreuth, Germany ‡ Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany ‖ St. Francis Xavier University, Canada Welcome to the 18th IEEE International Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Scientific and Engineering Computing (PDSEC-17), held on June 02, 2016 in Orlando, USA, in conjunction with the 31st IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2017). The field of high performance computing has earned promi- nence through advances in electronic and integrated technolo- gies. Current times are very exciting and the years to come will witness a proliferation in the use of parallel and distributed systems. As in previous years, we saw a continuation in the increase in the use of board-level massively parallel processors for scientific applications, with one quarter of the papers of the workshop utilizing GP-GPUs and manycore processors for this purpose. The scientific and engineering application domains have a key role in shaping future research and development activities in academia and industry, especially when the solution of large and complex problems must cope with tight timing schedules. One of the most challenging issues facing scientific and engineering computing today is how both applications and systems must evolve for increasingly larger scales of com- putation. This year we were especially delighted to have Dr Pavan Balaji, Team Leader of the Programming Models and Runtime Systems Group at Argonne National Laboratories, USA, deliver the PDSEC-17 keynote speech Onwards and Upwards to a New Era in Supercomputing. For this year’s workshop we have received many high- quality submissions from Asia Pacific, Europe, North America and South America. In a peer-reviewing phase with at least 3 reviews per paper, the submissions were judged by originality, relevance, technical quality, and clarity of presentation. Based on the reviews, we decided to accept 12 high-quality papers for presentation in the technical program of PDSEC-17 out of 25 papers submitted. This year we are pleased to announce that the Best Paper Award went to Ichitaro Yamazaki, Mark Hoemmen, Piotr Luszczek, and Jack Dongarra for their paper Improving perfor- mance of GMRES by reducing communication and pipelining global collectives. The annual PDSEC workshop brings together researchers from computer science, applied mathematics and other appli- cation areas of high-performance computing to present, discuss and exchange ideas, results, work in progress and experiences in the area of parallel and distributed computing for problems in science and engineering applications. For the contributed papers, application areas were mostly in physics, with a strong emphasis on particle dynamics. The bulk of the papers however concentrated on algorithms and techniques to support scientific and engineering applications. The former included more fundamental work on linear algebra, with some 4 papers on this theme. The latter included utilizing asychronicity and locality in many-task systems and data distribution techniques. The program for this workshop is the result of hard and excellent work of many others. We would like to express our sincere appreciation to all authors for their valuable contributions and to all program committee members and external reviewers for their cooperation and diligent work in completing the workshop program under a very tight schedule. Last but not least, we thank Bora Uc ¸ar (CNRS and ENS Lyon, France), the IPDPS 2017 Workshops Chair, and Ra- machandran Vaidyanathan (Louisiana State University, USA), the IPDPS 2017 Workshops Proceedings Chair, for helping and encouraging the inclusion of the PDSEC-17 workshop in IPDPS 2017. 2017 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops 978-0-7695-6149-3/17 $31.00 © 2017 IEEE DOI 10.1109/IPDPSW.2017.210 1115 2017 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops 978-1-5386-3408-0/17 $31.00 © 2017 IEEE DOI 10.1109/IPDPSW.2017.210 1115