[Review] Assessment: Problems, Developments and Statistical Issues; a Volume of Expert Contributions. Edited by H. Goldstein and T. Lewis. ISBN 0 471 95668 6. Wiley, Chichester, 1996. viii+274 pp., £45.

This is a book on general issues to do with assessment, not a statistics book, although it touches on statistical issues. Although it is intended for an international readership to include teachers, educationalists, policy makers and personnel managers and would be of interest to such groups it has been written mainly from the viewpoint of developed countries and is not obviously essential reading or an essential purchase for anyone. Short biographies of the 15 contributors are given at the start of the book and references from all the chapters are brought together at the end. The order of chapters appears to be arbitrary to some extent and there is little cross-referencing from one chapter to another.

Semi-automatic parallelisation of unstructured mesh codes

The availability of CFD software that can easily be used and produce high efficiency on a wide range of parallel computers is extremely limited. The investment and expertise required to parallelise a code can be enormous. In addition, the cost of supercomputers forces high utilisation to justify their purchase, requiring a wide range of software. To break this impasse, tools are urgently required to assist in the parallelisation process that dramatically reduce the parallelisation time but do not degrade the performance of the resulting parallel software. In this paper we discuss enhancements to the Computer Aided Parallelisation Tools (CAPTools) to assist in the parallelisation of complex unstructured mesh-based computational mechanics codes.