The ParForCE Project Technology Transfer Workshop

January 15-16, 1996, Madrid, Spain

Workshop Description and General Information

The final ParForCE project workshop will take place on January 15-16, 1996 in Madrid. ParForCE is an Esprit-funded research project that has advanced the state of the art in automatic exploitation of parallelism and (constraint) logic programming. The workshop marks the end of the project and is intended to provide an overview of the results of the project and to prepare the ground for technology transfer to industry. As a representative of an industrial center with interest in these areas we would like with this letter to bring the workshop to your attention and ask if you and/or one or more of your colleagues could attend it.

Parallel processing can offer high performance at a reasonable cost through the use of multiple processing units built with standard state of the art technology. The recent appearance in the market of very competitively priced multiprocessor departmental servers, which are in many cases replacing mainframes, as well as the widespread availability of local area networks of desktop machines or even multiprocessor workstations, means that machines capable of achieving high performance through parallelism are in fact already installed in many enterprises. However, the traditional problem persists with conventional approaches in that exploiting this performance in applications is difficult because it generally requires tedious hand-coded program parallelization.

The aim of the ParForCE project has been to directly address this problem by constructing (and evaluating the use of) formal tools for the development of parallel programs and their efficient execution. Both well understood and novel techniques for formal program analysis and manipulation have been applied to the central issues in parallel execution such as dependency and granularity analysis, partitioning, or memory management. As a testbed, tools based on these techniques have been built to aid in the formal development of parallel (constraint) logic programs. These tools have then been integrated with parallel execution platforms and their effectiveness assessed. In addition to simplifying the development of complex applications, the use of (constraint) logic programming offers the advantage of preserving more of the parallelism inherent in the application, thus allowing largely transparent exploitation of such parallelism, and the clear semantics provide amenability to formal treatment.

The purpose of the workshop is to offer a tutorial presentation of the techniques developed in the project and to demonstrate the resulting tools and systems. We will also present our view of the future in the areas related to the project. A tentative schedule for the workshop is enclosed.

Some of the highlights of ParForCE are:

• Advanced tools for program parallelization.
• Tools for parallel program execution visualization.
• A first set of tools for granularity control.
• High-performance problem solving through parallel execution of constraint logic programming.
• High-level, concurrent constraint logic programming.
• Study of parallel program development techniques.
• Extensive performance assessment on readily available parallel platforms.

• Phone: +341-336-7448
• Fax: +341-352-4819

• Phone: +341-336-7435
• Fax: +341-352-4819

Please feel free to distribute this information to other parties that you feel may be interested in the workshop.