The virus struck suddenly and without mercy, spreading across the globe in a matter of weeks, transforming every living thing into grotesque monstrosities - part human, part plant, part animal, and altogether very, very dangerous. Few were immune. But there were survivors. There was hope for some. Abby is a young Australian woman, living in London. Trapped in the Docklands, she searches desperately for a way to go on living and flee the capital city. Phil is a doctor and dedicated husband, caring for his infected wife and hoping to find a way to prevent the disease from consuming her completely.

Arriving on the back of a meteorite, an alien pathogen has spread rapidly around the world, infecting all living humans and animals, and killing off all insect life. Only plant life seem to be resistant. The infected do not die, however, but instead begin to mutate into horrendous creatures, gaining plant-like qualities and even melding with one another to create monstrosities of nightmare proportions. Only a handful are immune, and these survivors cling desperately to life, searching for food, fresh water, and a means of escape, find rescue, and discover a way to rebuild. Becky is a young woman, taking refuge in her flat in the southern English city of Brighton, along with her friend Abby, an Australian woman she met online. Harry is a member of the Posse, a group of five men enjoying the anarchy of the United Kingdom, smashing and grabbing what they can to survive, caring little for whom they harm along the way. Brad and his dog Sam are searching Oxford for Brad's fiance, Anne, battling their way to Christ Church College. Paths will cross, more lives will be lost and destroyed, and the world will give way to its new host.

HF-Tech's chips have changed the world. Embedded into the heads of over 90% of the world's population, they have cured autism, dementia, provided intelligence boosts, and helped to ease some of the more mundane tasks in life. Daniel Blair works in the Workshop, creating ROMs and hacking the chips to further increase their usefulness, an activity that is deemed illegal. But Rouge, his favoured ROM, is better than the official firmware; it simply does more. And besides, who knows what really goes into HF-Tech's official software releases? What is it capable of sending? And what can it receive? Dan doesn't quite trust them, not least of all because of the flaws in the system. And when the day comes that HF-Tech releases a software update that allows a terrorist attack to take place, Dan begins to distrust the company even more. But is there a threat closer to home that he should be paying more attention to..?

This book presents the most important parallel algorithms for the solution of linear systems. Despite the evolution and significance of the field of parallel solution of linear systems, no book is completely dedicated to the subject. People interested in the themes covered by this book belong to two different groups: numerical linear algebra and theoretical computer science, and this is the first effort to produce a useful tool for both. The book is organized as follows: after introducing the general features of parallel algorithms and the most important models of parallel computation, the authors analyze the complexity of solving linear systems in the circuit, PRAM, distributed, and VLSI models. The approach covers both the general case (i.e. dense linear systems without structure) and many important special cases (i.e. banded, sparse, Toeplitz, circulant linear systems).