krj@utcsri.UUCP (Ken Jackson) (07/22/88)
NA Digest Sunday, July 17, 1988 Volume 88 : Issue 28 Today's Editor: Cleve Moler Today's Topics: NA-NET 4th Copper Mountain Multigrid Conference Symposium on Computer Architecture in Israel Floating-Point Indoctrination: Final Lecture Ascher's Sabbatical Year ------------------------------------------------------- From: The NA-NET <nanet@na-net.stanford.edu> Date: Mon, 11 Jul 88 17:24:44 PDT Subject: NA-NET We now have 1277 entries on the NA-NET. --Mark ------------------------------ From: Steve McCormick <stevem@boulder.Colorado.EDU> Date: Tue, 12 Jul 88 14:30:13 MDT Subject: 4th Copper Mountain Multigrid Conference 4th COPPER MOUNTAIN CONFERENCE ON MULTIGRID METHODS ***announcement and call for papers*** April 9-13 1989 Copper Mountain, Colorado Organized by: The University of Colorado at Denver The Center for Applied Parallel Processing The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Sponsored by: The U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research The Gesellschaft fuer Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung Special Features: Multigrid Tutorial Panel on Parallel Multigrid Methods Theme: Novel Parallel Methods Chairmen: Jan Mandel & Steve McCormick, CU-Denver Program Chairmen: Joel Dendy, Los Alamos National Laboratory Seymour Parter, University of Wisconsin John Ruge, CU-Denver Klaus Stueben, GMD Ulrich Trottenberg, GMD Tutorial Chairman: Bill Briggs, CU-Denver Panel Chairman: Oliver McBryan, CU-Boulder Theme Chairman: Charbel Farhat, CU-Boulder PROGRAM: We are currently arranging the program that will include invited and contributed talks. We encourage contributions that represent significant advances in the field, including basic aspects and applications. We are especially interested in novel parallel methods that are not necessarily either well developed or strictly of multigrid type. Contributors should send title and short abstract (a paragraph or two) to one of the chairmen at the address below by October 14. Anyone interested in organizing a special session focusing on a particular topic should contact one of the program chairmen. STUDENT SUPPORT: Funds are available for supporting student participation in the conference and tutorial. Matching support is encouraged. Please write to one of the chairmen with information on the planned degree and topic, the status, advisor, motive for attending, and any available matching funds. NOTE: Accommodations are limited, so early reservations are encouraged. There are a few deluxe two bedroom condominiums that can easily handle two to four people at a relatively low cost of $137 per night, but these go fast. FOR ROOM RESERVATION FORMS/REGISTRATION FORMS/FURTHER INFORMATION: Jan Mandel or Steve McCormick Computational Math Group, c.b. 170 The University of Colorado at Denver 1200 Larimer Street Denver, CO 80204 (303)556-4807 e-mail: jmandel@cudenver.bitnet smccormick@cudenver.bitnet ------------------------------ From: Gabriel Silberman <gabby%TECHSEL.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu> Date: Wed Jul 13 12:23:36 1988 Subject: Symposium on Computer Architecture in Israel CALL FOR PAPERS The 16th Annual International Symposium on COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE May 28th - June 1st, 1989 Jerusalem, Israel sponsored by Computer Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Association for Computing Machinery STEERING COMMITTEE Doug DeGroot, Texas Instruments, USA Zary Segall, Carnegie-Mellon Univ., USA Yale N. Patt, UC, Berkeley, USA SYMPOSIUM COMMITTEE General Co-Chairs: Michael Yoeli and Gabriel M. Silberman, Technion, Israel Vice-Chairs, USA: Gideon Frieder, Syracuse Univ., USA Zeev Barzilai, IBM Research, USA Vice-Chair, Europe: Ulrich Trottenberg, SUPRENUM GmbH, F.R.Germany Vice-Chair, Far-East: Yoshihiro Tohma, Tokyo Inst. of Tech., Japan Finance and Local Arrangements Chair: Ran Ginosar, Technion, Israel Publicity and Publications Chair: Uri Weiser, Intel, Israel Exhibits Chair: Sam Bergman, Ben-Gurion Univ., Israel Program-Chair Posters Chair Jean Claude Syre Benjamin Atlas European Comp. Indust. Res. Centre Rafael, Dept. 84 F.R.Germany P.O.Box 2250, Haifa 31021, Israel Program Vice-Chair, USA Registration and Arvind Student Grants Chair Lab. for Comp. Sci., MIT Ilan Spillinger 545 Technology Sq. EE Dept., Technion Cambridge, MA 02139, USA Haifa 32000, Israel Program Vice-Chair, Europe/Israel Tutorials Chair John Gurd Daniel Tabak Comp. Sci. Dept., Univ. of Manchester ECE Dept., George Mason Univ. Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK Fairfax, VA 22030, USA Program Vice-Chair, Far-East Panels Chair Masaru Kitsuregawa Andre van Tilborg Inst. of Indust. Sci., Univ. of Tokyo Office of Naval Res., USA 22-1 Roppongi 7, Minato-ku Tokyo 106, Japan PROGRAM COMMITTEE MEMBERS H. Amano, Keio Univ., Japan D. Lawrie, Univ. of Illinois, USA J.P. Banatre, IRISA, France S. Nagashima, Hitachi, Japan D. Comte, ONERA CERT, France J. Noye, ECRC, F.R.Germany E. Davidson, Univ. of Michigan, USA E. Odijk, Philips, Holland J. Goodman, Univ. of Wisconsin, USA K.H. Park, KAIST, Korea A. Goto, ICOT, Japan Y. Patt, UC Berkeley, USA A. Gottlieb, NYU, USA B.R. Rau, CYDROME, USA A. Hattori, Fujitsu, Japan R.D. Rettberg, BBN, USA R.N. Ibbeth, Univ. of Edinburgh, UK L. Roncarolo, ELSAG, Italy C.R. Jesshope, Southampton Univ., UK S. Ruhman, Weizmann Inst., Israel R. Keller, Quintus, USA K. Shibayama, Kyoto Univ., Japan T. Knight, MIT, USA H. Tanaka, Univ. of Tokyo, Japan N. Koike, NEC, Japan U. Weiser, Intel, Israel I. Koren, Univ. of Massachusetts, USA T. Yuba, ETL, Japan Submit five copies of papers (in English, not to exceed 20 double-space pages) to the Program Vice-Chair of your region. Papers will be accepted for evaluation until November 11, 1988. Each paper should have a cover page which includes: paper title, full names, affiliations, complete addresses, and phone numbers of the authors, 100 to 150-word abstract and a list of up to 5 keywords. Notifications of acceptance will be given by February 10, 1989. Authors of accepted papers will be requested to sub- mit a final, camera-ready copy by March 10, 1989. Tutorials will be held on May 28 and June 1. Send five copies of propo- sals for full or 1/2 day tutorials to the Tutorials Chair. Tutorial pro- posals must be received by November 25, 1988. Proposals should include: speaker resume, tutorial title, intended audience, assumed attendee back- ground, course description, outline, and a sample of several overhead/slides from the tutorial. Industry-oriented papers and papers on work in progress may be submitted for presentation at poster sessions. For information contact the Poster Session Chair. For information about student travel grants, contact the Registration and Student Grants Chair. Papers and tutorials are solicited in any aspect of Computer Architec- ture. Topic areas include, but are not limited to: * Architectures for artificial intelligence applications * Novel computing techniques * Distributed and parallel architectures * Language and operating systems oriented architectures * Application-specific architectures * Performance evaluation and measurement * Technology impact on architecture * Memory systems * Tools and methods for architecture design and description ------------------------------ From: David Hough <dgh@Sun.COM> Date: Thu, 14 Jul 88 12:57:53 PDT Subject: Floating-Point Indoctrination: Final Lecture During May-July 1988, Prof. W. Kahan of the University of California presented a lecture course on Computer System Support for Scientific and Engineering Computation at Sun Microsystems in Mountain View, CA. To summarize this course, Prof. Kahan will present a final lecture, at 7:30 PM on Thursday, 28 July 1988, at Apple Computer's DeAnza-3 Building, 10500 N DeAnza Boulevard, Cupertino, CA. Enter from the south side. This final lecture is free to the public. Please pub- licize to interested colleagues. ABSTRACT Most scientific and engineering computer users consider irrelevant the details of floating-point hardware implemen- tation, compiler code generation, and system exception han- dling, until some anomalous behavior confronts them and prevents the satisfactory completion of a computational task. Some of these confrontations are inevitable conse- quences of the use of finite-precision floating-point arith- metic; others are gratuitous results of hardware and software designs diminished by the designers' well- intentioned corner-cutting. Distinguishing the intrinsic from the gratuitous is no simple matter; such chastened com- puter users are not sure what they might reasonably demand of computer system purveyors. The novice's impression that there is no rhyme nor reason to the dark mysteries of floating-point computation is some- times superseded by a euphoric discovery that there is a good deal that can be axiomatized and proven about floating point; later experience may temper such a discovery by indi- cating that not everything that can be axiomatized or proven is worth the trouble. Furthermore, what would be worth knowing is often surprisingly difficult to encapsulate and refractory to prove; even when each subproblem of a realis- tic application permits a satisfactory error analysis, the overall problem may admit no such analysis. The proofs of simple statements about algorithms or programs often require machinery from other parts of mathematics far more elaborate than expected. Thus some of the mathematically inclined who become involved in these studies, out of external necessity, then become permanently sidetracked by intricate mathemati- cal issues. To remain relevant, a sense of engineering econ- omy must guide such studies, in order to distinguish the things that are worth doing, and therefore worth doing well, from those that aren't. Over the nearly twenty years since this lecture course was first presented, the software environment has gradually deteriorated despite that hardware has improved. The software deterioration may be attributable to the establishment of Computer Science as a separate academic discipline, whose graduates need have little acquaintance with scientific computation. The hardware improvement can be principally attributed to the advent and acceptance, for most microcomputers, of the ANSI/IEEE Standards 754 and 854 for floating-point arithmetic. But some of the potential benefits of those standards are lost because so much software was and is written to exploit only those few worthwhile features common to almost all commercially signi- ficant existing systems. In fact, much portable mathemati- cal software, created with funding directly or indirectly from American taxpayers, is crippled by a misguided quest for performance on the fastest existing supercomputers regardless of detriment to far more numerous mini- and microcomputers. Well-intentioned attempts by language architects and stan- dardizing bodies to ameliorate some of the difficulties encountered in floating-point computation have too often exacerbated them and, in some instances, spread over them a fog caused by ostensibly insignificant variations in the definitions of words with otherwise familiar connotations. What we need now is a measure of consensus on language- independent definitions of needed functionality, even if we must sacrifice some compatibility with past practice to achieve intellectual economy in the future. Alas, few pro- fessionals will pay the present costs of incompatibility with past errors to achieve gains promised for an indeter- minate future. The computing world has too many broken promises rusting in its basement. One of the anticipated outcomes of this course is that lec- ture notes will eventually be published reflecting current thinking on some of these issues. In addition a group of students has undertaken to improve the implementation of certain elementary transcendental functions to a better standard than has been customary. ------------------------------ From: Uri Ascher <ascher%cs.ubc.ca@RELAY.CS.NET> Date: 14 Jul 88 16:04 -0700 Subject: Ascher's Sabbatical Year Dear friends and colleagues, Starting next month (August) I'll be on leave for one year at Dept Applied Mathematics, Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, Israel 76100. Do let me know if you plan to be in the neighborhood. My e-mail address will be maascher@weizmann.bitnet Hopefully, mail sent to me at my usual address in Vancouver will be forwarded, too. Uri Ascher ------------------------------ End of NA Digest ************************** ------- Reposted by