Guest editorial – Parallel and distributed computing and applications

Computational systems that can perform multiple operations or tasks simultaneously have been under many years of development and evolvement, adapting to the requirements on energy efficiency and conservation in global economy. The objective of this special collection is to publish and overview recent trends in the interdisciplinary area of parallel and distributed computing, applications and technologies. This special collection include the following 3 papers, covering topics of data locality optimization in Spark computing environment, neural network accelerators with optical computing and communication, human action recognition based on skeleton features.