The Middle East in the Global Era features scholarly perspectives that explore a variety of topics related to the Middle East and North African regions, including politics, international relations, economics, history, gender issues, and culture. Students are encouraged to think analytically regarding issues of prosperity, peace, stability, sustainable development, and more. Section I explores the physical and political landscapes of the Middle East, underscoring the importance of geography in shaping contemporary affairs. In Section II, students read articles about regional powers, including the rivalry of Iran and Saudi Arabia and the role of Turkey in the Middle East. Section III focuses on political economy with chapters that cover the regional impact of the 2011 Arab uprisings and the rentier economy that prevails in many Gulf states. Section IV examines recent changes in the region that consider political, cultural, and social changes. In the final section, students consider the intricacies involved in pursuing peace in the Middle East. The Middle East in the Global Era is an ideal textbook for any course that explores the social, political, and cultural facets of the Middle East.

Parallelanddistributedprocessing, althoughwithinthefocusofcomputerscience researchforalongtime, isgainingmoreandmoreimportanceinawidespectrum of applications. These proceedings aim to demonstrate the use of parallel and distributed processing concepts in di?erent application ?elds, and attempt to spark interest in novel research directions to advance the embracing model of high-performance computing research in general. The objective of these workshops is to speci?cally address researchers c- ing from university, industry and governmental research organizations and application-oriented companies, in order to close the gap between purely s- enti?c research and the applicability of the research ideas to real-life problems. Euro-Par is an annual series of international conferences dedicated to the promotionandadvancementofallaspectsofparallelanddistributedcomputing. The 2007 event was the 13th issue of the conference. Euro-Par has for a long time been eager to attract colocated events sharing the same goal of promoting the development of parallel and distributed computing, both as an industrial technique and an academic discipline, extending the frontier of both the state of the art and the state of the practice. Since 2006, Euro-Par o?ers researchersthe chance to colocate advanced technical workshops back-to-back with the main conference. This is for a mutual bene?t: the workshops can take advantage of all technical and social facilities which are set up for the conference, so that the organizational tasks are kept to a minimal level; the conference can rely on workshopstoexperimentwithspeci?careasofresearchwhicharenotyetmature enough, or too speci?c, to lead to an o?cial, full-?edged topic at the conferenc