In 1989, Michael Rabin proposed a fundamentally new approach to the problems of fault-tolerant routing and memory management in parallel computation based on the idea of information dispersal. Yuh-Dauh Lyuu developed this idea in a number of new and exciting ways. Further work has led to extensions of these methods to other applications such as shared memory emulations. This volume is a self-contained book about parallel computers, which gives a detailed treatment of the vital issues of communication, fault-tolerance, on-line maintenance, emulation of ideal parallel computation models, and synchronization. Each chapter contains the necessary background information in mathematics, coding theory, interconnection, networks, and graph theory.