th This volume contains a selection of 41 refereed papers presented at the 18 International Conference of Domain Decomposition Methods hosted by the School of ComputerScience and Engineering(CSE) of the Hebrew Universityof Jerusalem, Israel, January 12-17, 2008. 1 Background of the Conference Series The International Conference on Domain Decomposition Methods has been held in twelve countries throughout Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America, beginning in Paris in 1987. Originally held annually, it is now spaced at roughly 18-month intervals. A complete list of past meetings appears below. The principal technical content of the conference has always been mathematical, but the principal motivation has been to make ef cient use of distributed memory computers for complex applications arising in science and engineering. The leading 15 such computers, at the "petascale" characterized by 10 oating point operations per second of processing power and as many Bytes of application-addressablem- ory, now marshal more than 200,000 independentprocessor cores, and systems with many millions of cores are expected soon. There is essentially no alternative to - main decomposition as a stratagem for parallelization at such scales. Contributions from mathematicians, computerscientists, engineers, and scientists are together n- essary in addressing the challenge of scale, and all are important to this conference.

th This volume contains a selection of 41 refereed papers presented at the 18 International Conference of Domain Decomposition Methods hosted by the School of ComputerScience and Engineering(CSE) of the Hebrew Universityof Jerusalem, Israel, January 12-17, 2008. 1 Background of the Conference Series The International Conference on Domain Decomposition Methods has been held in twelve countries throughout Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America, beginning in Paris in 1987. Originally held annually, it is now spaced at roughly 18-month intervals. A complete list of past meetings appears below. The principal technical content of the conference has always been mathematical, but the principal motivation has been to make ef cient use of distributed memory computers for complex applications arising in science and engineering. The leading 15 such computers, at the "petascale" characterized by 10 oating point operations per second of processing power and as many Bytes of application-addressablem- ory, now marshal more than 200,000 independentprocessor cores, and systems with many millions of cores are expected soon. There is essentially no alternative to - main decomposition as a stratagem for parallelization at such scales. Contributions from mathematicians, computerscientists, engineers, and scientists are together n- essary in addressing the challenge of scale, and all are important to this conference.

When we first heard in the spring of 2000 that the Seminaire de matMmatiques superieures (SMS) was interested in devoting its session of the summer of 200l-its 40th-to scientific computing the idea of taking on the organizational work seemed to us somewhat remote. More immediate things were on our minds: one of us was about to go on leave to the Courant Institute, the other preparing for a research summer in Paris. But the more we learned about the possibilities of such a seminar, the support for the organization and also the great history of the SMS, the more we grew attached to the project. The topics we planned to cover were intended to span a wide range of theoretical and practical tools for solving problems in image processing, thin films, mathematical finance, electrical engineering, moving interfaces, and combustion. These applications alone show how wide the influence of scientific computing has become over the last two decades: almost any area of science and engineering is greatly influenced by simulations, and the SMS workshop in this field came very timely. We decided to organize the workshop in pairs of speakers for each of the eight topics we had chosen, and we invited the leading experts worldwide in these fields. We were very fortunate that every speaker we invited accepted to come, so the program could be realized as planned.