It is a great pleasure to present this collection of papers from LCR '98, the Fourth Workshop on Languages, Compilers, and Run-time Systems for Scalable Computers. The LCR workshop is a bi-annual gathering of computer scientists who develop software systems for parallel and distributed computers. LCR is held in alternating years with the ACM Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP) and draws from the same community. This fourth meeting was held in cooperation with ACM SIGPLAN on the c- pus of Carnegie Mellon University, May 28{30, 1998. There were 60 registered attendees from 9 nations. A total of 47 6-page extended abstracts were s- mitted. There were a total of 134 reviews for an average of 2.85 reviews per submission. Submissions were rank ordered by average review score. The top 23 submissions were selected as full papers and the next 9 as short papers. The program committee consisted of David Bakken (BBN), Ian Foster (- gonne), Thomas Gross (CMU and ETH Zurich), Charles Koelbel (Rice), Piyush Mehrotra (ICASE), David O'Hallaron, Chair (CMU), Joel Saltz (Maryland), - spal Subhlok (CMU), Boleslaw Szymanski (RPI), Katherine Yelick (Berkeley), and Hans Zima (Vienna).

For courses in Computer Science and Programming Computer systems: A Programmer's Perspective explains the underlying elements common among all computer systems and how they affect general application performance. Written from the programmer's perspective, this book strives to teach students how understanding basic elements of computer systems and executing real practice can lead them to create better programs. Spanning across computer science themes such as hardware architecture, the operating system, and systems software, the 3rd Edition serves as a comprehensive introduction to programming. This book strives to create programmers who understand all elements of computer systems and will be able to engage in any application of the field--from fixing faulty software, to writing more capable programs, to avoiding common flaws. It lays the groundwork for students to delve into more intensive topics such as computer architecture, embedded systems, and cybersecurity. This book focuses on systems that execute an x86-64 machine code, and recommends that students have access to a Linux system for this course. Students should have basic familiarity with C or C++.