The book presents an architectural approach to distributed and parallel programming using the C++ language. It describes simple methods for programming parallel virtual machines and the basics of developing clustered applications. This book will not only teach you how to write software components designed to work together in a networked environment, but will also serve as a reliable “guide” to standards for programmers who work on multitasking and multithreaded applications. Many years of experience have led the authors of the book to use agent-oriented architecture, and to minimize the cost of providing connections between system objects, they propose to use the “blackboard” methodology. This book is addressed to programmers, designers and developers of software products, as well as researchers, teachers and students who are interested in an introduction to parallel and distributed programming using the C++ language.