Designed for scientists, engineers, and students, this book presents a concise, practical introduction to high performance computing (HPC). It discusses the architecture of modern processors, providing a solid understanding of the performance potentials and limitations of current architectures and code. Moving from basic to advanced topics, the text covers key issues in HPC, including serial optimization, parallelism, OpenMP, MPI, and hybrid programming techniques. The authors also address advanced issues, such as solving affinity problems by pinning, writing efficient C++ code, and programmin.