This book provides a non-technical introduction to High Performance Computing applications together with advice about how beginners can start to write parallel programs. The authors show what HPC can offer geographers and social scientists and how it can be used in GIS. They provide examples of where it has already been used and suggestions for other areas of application in geography and the social sciences. Case studies drawn from geography explain the key principles and help to understand the logic and thought processes that lie behind the parallel programming.