Josh and Ixchel have landed in the Mayan era, when the prophecy about the world ending in 2012 was first foretold. And they cannot believe who they have found there. But a bigger surprise awaits the pair when they return to the 21st century. Nothing is quite as they remember it - and it's up to them to work out why.

From Pulitzer Prize winner Brent Staples, an evocative memoir that poses universal questions: Where does the family end and the self begin? What do we owe our families, and what do we owe our dreams for ourselves? What part of the past is a gift and what part a shackle? For Brent Staples there is the added dimension of race: moving from a black world into one largely defined by whites. The oldest song among nine children, Brent grew up in a small industrial town near Philadelphia. First a scholarship to a local college and then one for graduate study at the University of Chicago pulled him out of the close family circle. While he was away, the industries that supported the town failed, and drug dealing rushed in to fill the economic void. News of arrests and premature deaths among Brent's childhood friends underscored the precariousness of his perch in a world of mostly white achievers. A younger brother became a cocaine dealer and was murdered by one of his "clients." His death propelled Brent into a reconsideration of his childhood and coming-of-age that offers vivid portraits of family and place, of values that supported and pressures that tore apart, of the appeal and pain of entering a predominantly white world, and of the strengths and vulnerabilities of the black world he grew away from.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • COMING SOON TO APPLE TV+ • A “mind-blowing” (Entertainment Weekly) speculative thriller about an ordinary man who awakens in a world inexplicably different from the reality he thought he knew—from the author of Upgrade, Recursion, and the Wayward Pines trilogy “Are you happy with your life?” Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the kidnapper knocks him unconscious. Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits. Before a man he’s never met smiles down at him and says, “Welcome back, my friend.” In this world he’s woken up to, Jason’s life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college professor but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible. Is it this life or the other that’s the dream? And even if the home he remembers is real, how will Jason make it back to the family he loves? From the bestselling author Blake Crouch, Dark Matter is a mind-bending thriller about choices, paths not taken, and how far we’ll go to claim the lives we dream of.

This historical survey of parallel processing from 1980 to 2020 is a follow-up to the authors’ 1981 Tutorial on Parallel Processing, which covered the state of the art in hardware, programming languages, and applications. Here, we cover the evolution of the field since 1980 in: parallel computers, ranging from the Cyber 205 to clusters now approaching an exaflop, to multicore microprocessors, and Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) in commodity personal devices; parallel programming notations such as OpenMP, MPI message passing, and CUDA streaming notation; and seven parallel applications, such as finite element analysis and computer vision. Some things that looked like they would be major trends in 1981, such as big Single Instruction Multiple Data arrays disappeared for some time but have been revived recently in deep neural network processors. There are now major trends that did not exist in 1980, such as GPUs, distributed memory machines, and parallel processing in nearly every commodity device. This book is intended for those that already have some knowledge of parallel processing today and want to learn about the history of the three areas. In parallel hardware, every major parallel architecture type from 1980 has scaled-up in performance and scaled-out into commodity microprocessors and GPUs, so that every personal and embedded device is a parallel processor. There has been a confluence of parallel architecture types into hybrid parallel systems. Much of the impetus for change has been Moore’s Law, but as clock speed increases have stopped and feature size decreases have slowed down, there has been increased demand on parallel processing to continue performance gains. In programming notations and compilers, we observe that the roots of today’s programming notations existed before 1980. And that, through a great deal of research, the most widely used programming notations today, although the result of much broadening of these roots, remain close to target system architectures allowing the programmer to almost explicitly use the target’s parallelism to the best of their ability. The parallel versions of applications directly or indirectly impact nearly everyone, computer expert or not, and parallelism has brought about major breakthroughs in numerous application areas. Seven parallel applications are studied in this book.