WoTUG-21 conference showcases design technology for safe network computing
Last week's conference at the University of Kent organised by WoTUG
was characterised by real, working solutions for the development
of networked computer applications. Important themes for the conference
included `reliable multithreaded Java systems', `commodity
super-computing', `safe and fast language systems for modern
microprocessor architectures and interconnect', `hardware design'
and `rock solid mathematical foundation'.
Professor Peter Welch, the conference organiser and chairman of
WoTUG, said:
The WoTUG community has been working hard to establish
the theory and empirical knowledge about communicating systems.
There is a real buzz now because we see our work coming forward
to apply to mainstream computing in areas as diverse as web-hosted
Java applications, specialist embedded systems
(like multimedia and avionics), hardware design (reconfigurable
FPGAs and ASICs), highly mobile -- in fact, wearable -- networked
personal processors and supercomputing (such as the
superdata gather/filter needs of the particle colliders at CERN
in Geneva and the new Massively Parallel Media Processor at Bristol).
The Java aspects in the conference were especially timely ... given
the recent warnings from Sun urging ``extreme caution'' in the use of
multithreading (despite the natural attraction of threads for modelling
the way the world works). With raw Java, that warning is right
and proper. But a huge collaborative effort within WoTUG has yielded,
and now supports, lightweight class libraries that make available to Java
the CSP multiprocessing model of Tony Hoare and David May.
Java active processes can now communicate and synchronise through CSP
primitives, allowing 20 years of theory and associated
tools to be deployed for the elimination of scheduling dependent race
hazards, deadlock, livelock and process starvation. For the variety
of platforms through which typical Java applications migrate, the
thread-safe guarantees automatically provided by CSP design patterns
have arrived `just in time'. Anyone can use them -- no knowledge of
the underlying mathematics is required. That maths is built into
the implementation of the libraries and the user automatically gets
the benefit. These are significant developments.
Making its debut at the conference, a new model of CSP simplifies its semantics
and extends its area of application to deal with priorities and real hardware.
A powerful new technique for verifying the correctness of implementation against
specification was also introduced.
The problems of building efficient High Performance Computing engines out of commodity
processors and interconnect are near to being sorted, which is crucial
with so many of the specialist solutions no longer with us. The original
CSP language, occam, was shown off on its shiny new platforms
(SPARC, Pentium, Alpha, PowerPC, SHARC, ...), optimised and
extended for SMP desktops and still retaining a level of security
unmatched by traditional languages -- and with a multithreading context-switch
time heading for the 100 nanosecond barrier. It all proved too much for
some of us, with late night discussions running through to 5 in the morning
... and only a year to recover before the next one.
Notes For Editors
Peter Welch
Peter Welch graduated in Mathematics from Warwick University in 1969,
taking his Ph.D in Computer Science from the same institution in 1974.
His doctoral research was on semantic models for the lambda-calculus,
one of the key mathematical theories supporting functional programming.
He has researched into a range of system design methods and tools for
parallel processing, testing these against application areas such as real-time
control, vision processing, networking and biological/physical system
modelling. He led the UK-funded occam-for-all
project, which has retargeted occam to a variety of modern parallel
architectures and developed the language to support (virtual)
shared memory multiprocessors whilst retaining its simplicity, security
and efficiency. He is now researching into the relationships between
objects and communicating processes and is actively
collaborating with all the groups looking at how this impacts on Java.
He was appointed Professor of Parallel Computing at
the University of Kent (England) in 1989 and is currently Chairman of
WoTUG.
WoTUG
WoTUG is an informal association established 14 years ago to encourage
scientific and technological
discussion of the theory, practice and application of distributed and
parallel computation. Included in its field of interest are all
aspects of hardware and software development designed for use in
parallel computation and communication, with special emphasis on those
derived from and furthering the understanding of communicating processes.
As such it has
proved to be interdisciplinary in character, representing a broad range of
activities in industry, research laboratories and educational
establishments.
WoTUG-21 was the 21st. international conference organised by its European
branch. Information about the conference, including synopses of the papers
and tutorials presented can be found at:
http://www.hensa.ac.uk/parallel/groups/wotug/wotug21/
United Kingdom Tuesday, April 14, 1998
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