.. _about:

=============================================================
About these notes -- important disclaimers
=============================================================

These note on high performance scientific computing are being developed for
the course `Applied Mathematics <http://www.amath.washington.edu/>`_ `483/583
<http://www.amath.washington.edu/courses/583-spring-2013/index.html>`_ 
at the `University of Washington
<http://www.washington.edu>`_, Spring Quarter, 2013.  


They are very much a work in progress.  Many pages are not yet here and the
ones that are will mostly be modified and supplemented as the quarter
progresses.   

It is not intended to be a complete textbook on the subject, by any means.
The goal is to get the student started with a few key concepts and
techniques and then encourage further reading elsewhere.  
So it is a collection of brief introductions to various important topics
with pointers to books, websites, and other references for more details.
See the :ref:`biblio` for more references and other suggested readings.

There are many pointers to Wikipedia pages sprinkled through the notes and
in the bibliography, simply because these pages often give a good overview
of issues without getting into too much detail.  They are not necessarily
definitive sources of accurate information.  

These notes are mostly written in Sphinx (see :ref:`sphinx`) and the input
files are available using git (see :ref:`classgit`).

.. _license:

License
-------

These notes are being made freely available and are released under the 
`Creative Commons <http://creativecommons.org/>`_ `CC BY license
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/>`_.
This means that you are welcome to use them and quote from them
as long as you give appropriate attribution.

Of course you should always do this with any material you find on the web or
elsewhere, provided you are allowed to reuse it at all.  

You should also give some thought to licensing issues whenever you post your
own work on the web, including computer code.
Whether or not you want others to be able to make use
of it for various purposes, make your intentions known.