About the Author R. MICHAEL HORD is a national leader in high-performance computing and is presently a member of the senior technical staff at DBA Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Titan Corporation. His prior experience includes positions with MRJ, Inc., General Research Corporation, and Institute for Advanced Computation, among others. Mr. Hord has also worked under contract for NASA and the Air Force where he and his staff assessed technology readiness for future space systems and performed application analysis for innovative on-board processor architectures. Mr. Hord has written seven books and scores of papers addressing advanced parallel computing, digital image processing, and space technology. He has long been active in the applied imagery pattern recognition community, has been an IEEE Distinguished Visitor, and is a guest lecturer at several universities. His B.S. in physics was granted by Notre Dame University in 1962 and in 1966 he earned an M.S. in physics from the University of Maryland.