rick@cs.arizona.edu (Rick Schlichting) (10/02/90)
Back issues of the reports on Japanese computing by Dr. David Kahaner are now available by anonymous FTP from host cs.arizona.edu. The reports can be found in directory "japan/kahaner.reports," which also contains an INDEX file summarizing each report. (That information is also appended below.) To help keep track of demand, we would appreciate it if you would send an email note to rick@cs.arizona.edu upon retrieving a report. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rick Schlichting, Associate Professor (rick@cs.arizona.edu) Dept of Computer Science, The University of Arizona ------------------------------------------------------------------------- INDEX OF KAHANER REPORTS ------------------------- 10ssymp The tenth meeting of Software Symposium, held in Kyoto Japan 6-8 June 1990 is briefly summarized. The most interesting aspects were discussions by the Chinese of their national project. anritsu Commercialization of PAX by Anritsu Corporation. atr The Advanced Telecommunication Research Institute (ATR) control.34 Proceedings of 34th annual Conference of Institute of Systems, Control and Information Engineers. The papers cover topics in optical computing, neural computing, fuzzy logic, control theory, robotics, parallel computing, vision, knowledge engineering, imaging, feature extraction, probability, communications networks, etc., as well as applications to car location, fish school size estimates, mathematical programming, factory automation and many others. crc This report illustrates the breadth of applications and research areas of a "service bureau" organization, Century Research Corporation (CRC), Tokyo. dataflow Bulletin Board for DATAFLOW computing information from ETL. etl A visit to the Data Flow project at ETL is summarized. The Dataflow SIGMA-1 computer project is ending. The new project EM-4, will have 1,024 processors and is designed to have less overhead. EM-4 was originally proposed for symbolic rather than numeric computation, but the designers now feel that with the inclusion of floating point hardware it will also be used for numerical computation. Currently an 80 processor version of EM-4 is running at 997 MIPs. fgcs Announcement of report by T. Kurozumi on ICOT Fifth Generation Computer Systems Project. flexible A summary of "1990 Japan-USA Symposium on Flexible Automation" 9-13 July in Kyoto, Japan is given. Plant visits to IBM's 3090 manufacturing plant, Sumitomo Electric, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and Matshushita Electric are described. fujitsu.3d Fujitsu's 3D movie generated partially via CAP 256 parallel computer. fuzzy A survey of recent developments is given, with particular emphasis on Japanese contributions. highspd The major topics at the Conference of the Achievements of the National R & D Program "High-Speed Computing System for Scientific and Technological Uses", held 21 June 1990, at the Electrotechnical Laboratory in Tsukuba Japan are summarized. hitachi Hitachi's research plan for the 1990's and computer related research in the company's research laboratories are summarized. At the Advanced Research Laboratory, the long term view is explicitly manifest in the General Manager's office and also evident in the researchers plans. ibm-nic The IBM Tokyo Numerically Intensive Computation Center is reviewed. This center mainly supports users who wish to develop vectorized versions of programs on IBM's 3090 VF computers. The Tokyo Research Laboratory performs longer term research in computer science, mathematics, graphics, and languages. ieice Papers presented at the joint Japanese Institute of Electronics, Information and Communications Engineers (IEICE) and the Japanese Information Processing Society meeting, July 18-20 1990 on parallel processing. info90 Announcement of meeting to be held in Tokyo early October 1990. iscm The International Symposium on Computational Mathematics Matsuyama (Shikoku Island) 30 August--4 September 1990 is summarized, with special emphasis on the contributions from Japanese and Chinese researchers. Visits by Kelley to Kyushu University, Kyoto University, and the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, with special emphasis on optimization research, are described. isdn Papers on ISDN (Integrated Service Digital Network). j-supers List of Supercomputers in Japan. japan.rpt Availability of two Japanese reports, Visions from MITI, Trends from AIST. japgovt A brief outline of Japanese Government ministries and agencies is shown with an emphasis of those that support science and technology. Several major projects related to computing are described. japgovt.upd Update to japgovt [21 June 1990] on Japanese governmental structure. nipt A proposed new MITI national project "New Information Processing Technology" (NIPT) merging soft information processing with massive parallelism is described. The proposed project is also compared to related work in other countries. I am told that the project, in some form, has a good chance of being supported in the near future. ntt-rev.590 A new English journal from NTT is described. ohbayashi Computer Modeling in the Construction Industry-- Ohbayashi Corporation's Research Lab optical Optical computing activities in Japan are surveyed. pax The PAX parallel processing project developed at the University of Tsukuba by T. Hoshino is summarized. PAX is a two dimensional array of processors which operate in MIMD form. QCDPAX has a fast floating point unit, specially programmed for QCD calculations. Peak performance is 12.5 Gigaflops. pp90 Titles of papers presented at Information Processing Society of Japan Symposium on Parallel Processing '90, 17-19 May 1990. pricai.90 Announcement of Pacific Rim International Conference on AI, Nagoya 14-16 November 1990. quality.sw The Second International Workshop on Software Quality Improvement was held in Kyoto, Japan, from 22-24 January 1990. The workshop was jointly organized by Professor Torii (Osaka University) and Professor Basili (University of Maryland). The workshop is summarized from the perspective of a numerical analyst. The major conclusions are that some Japanese companies are better at managing the software development process than comparable U.S. companies and that more interaction is needed between numerical and nonnumerical software developers. scj90 Supercomputing Japan 90, 27-29 March 1990, Tokyo, Japan, and visit to NEC to see SX/3 supercomputer. sna90 The First International Conference on Supercomputing in Nuclear Applications (SNA90) was held from 12-15 March 1990 in Mito City, Japan. This paper summarizes the significant presentations and vendor exhibits associated with Japanese software and hardware. solvers.pde DEQSOL and ELLPACK : Two Problem Solving Environments For Partial Differential Equations are compared. By R. Boisvert and D. Kahaner. sony An overview of Sony's Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) is given. CSL specializes in research on object-oriented programming and distributed operating systems. speech.etl Summary of the report, Researches of the Electrotechnical Laboratory, Number 905, December 1989. "Studies on a Vocal Tract Model for Speech Synthesis and Analysis" (126 pages including 124 item bibliography) by Hiroshi Ohmura Speech Processing Section Machine Understanding Division Electrotechnical Laboratory spice We review research at Toshiba in vectorizing the circuit simulation program SPICE, and research at NEC at building a special purpose multiprocessor for circuit simulation modeling. sx3sale Sale of SX-3 to National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR) of Holland takagi Text of paper by H. Takagi (Matshshita Electric), "Fusion Technology of Fuzzy Theory and Neural Networks - Survey and Future Directions" containing more than 90 references, many not known outside Japan. trp12-89 Accompanying Professor Gene Golub, Computer Science Department, Stanford University to Institute of Statistical Mathematics, PAX computer project at University of Tsukuba, IBM's Tokyo Research Laboratory, Kyoto University's Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences, and Ryukoku University. trprpt.290 (1) Trip report 20-24 Feb 1990, Hiroshima and Ehime Universities (2) Brief reports: 9 Feb, Quantum Magneto Flux Project 13-14 Feb, UTokyo 15 Feb, Hitachi Central Research Lab 26 Feb, Nat Res Lab Metrology, Tsukuba 1 Mar, Parallel computing meeting, Keio University workshop.isr This report describes the 4th ISR Supercomputing Workshop: The Road to Parallel Applications, held from August 29 to 31, 1990 in Hakone, Japan. In addition, some observations on the trends and characteristics of parallel supercomputing research in Japan are presented. yosh Report by H. Yoshihara on Japanese Supercomputer Performance on specific computational fluid dynamics benchmark program and comparison with Cray.