met9i7n@BUACCA.BITNET ("Peter Mager") (09/07/88)
The following seminar may be of interest to you. ACM GREATER BOSTON CHAPTER SICPLAN Thursday, September 8, 1988 8 P.M. Bolt Beranek and Newman, Newman auditorium 70 Fawcett St., Cambridge Parallel Symbolic Computing Using Multilisp Robert H. Halstead, Jr. Laboratory for Computer Science MIT Multilisp is an extension of the Lisp dialect Scheme with additional operators and additional semantics for parallel execution. The principal parallelism construct in Multilisp is the "future," which exhibits some features of both eager and lazy evaluation. Multilisp has been implemented, and runs on the shared-memory Concert multiprocessor, using as many as 34 processors. The implementation uses interesting techniques for task scheduling and garbage collection. The task scheduler helps control excessive resource utilization by means of an unfair scheduling policy; the garbage collector uses a multiprocessor algorithm modeled after the incremental garbage collector of Baker. Current work focuses on making Multilisp a more humane programming environment, on expanding the power of Multilisp to express task scheduling policies, and on measuring the properties of Multilisp programs with the goal of designing a parallel architecture well tailored for efficient Multilisp execution. The talk will briefly describe Multilisp, discuss the areas of current activity, and outline the direction of the Multilisp project with special attention to the areas of task scheduling and architecture design. ACM GREATER BOSTON CHAPTER SICPLAN Dear Colleague, Our September speaker, Bert Halstead, is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. He is best known for pioneering Lisp multiprocessing and the concept of futures. Larry Snyder's talk last month showed us a programming environment that supports multiprocessing and explained some capabilites that can help make such environments more useful. Two local conferences this month are addressing similar issues of computer support for software engineering and parallel programming. CASE '88 was held at the Hyatt Hotel in Cambridge July 12-14. Contact Pam Meyer at Intek 494-8200 x1988 for information about proceedings. PPEALS, the ACM/SIGPLAN conference on Parallel Programming: Experience with Applications, Languages, and Systems will be held in New Haven, Conn. July 17-19. Contact Bill Gropp or Judy Terrell at Yale University, Dept. of Computer Science 203-432-1200. Both are said to have outstanding technical programs. Other talks currently planned include: - Tim Teitelbaum on "What's New with the Cornell Synthesizer" in November, - Mayer Schwartz on the use of hypertext in software development support systems in December, - and - Reidar Conradi on the Trondheim programming environment in January. In addition, we are planning a full day PDS seminar on code generation techniques, tentatively scheduled for Saturday, October 15. The main speaker will be Professor Robert Henry from the University of Washington, who will give a somewhat extended version of the tutorial he gave at the SIGPLAN '88 conference in Atlanta, with emphasis on extending Graham Glanville techniques. In addition, we are inviting leading compiler experts from Apollo, DEC, U. Mass. Boston and other places to discuss alternative techniques and current problems and issues including interaction of register allocation and optimization with code generation and use of dynamic programming and constraint rules to improve code generation efficiency. We will be meeting for dinner as usual at Joyce Chen's restaurant, 390 Rindge Ave., Cambridge at 6:00 p.m. before the meeting. If you wish to come, please call Karen Kelley or "Sigplan dinner" at Intermetrics (661-1840) as early as possible so we can make the appropriate dinner reservation. Peter Mager chairperson, Boston SICPLAN