will@uunet.UU.NET (William Pickles) (04/30/91)
April 1991 ... Strand Software Technologies Ltd. announce a version of the
parallel programming language STRAND88 running on a network of SUN
workstations - this treats the network as a single parallel machine and
liberates significant computing resources to users who might have been unaware
of the potential of the many workstations in their environment.
The networked version of STRAND88 enables users in the banking, defense and
financial marketplace to write the new programs employing paradigms of data-
fusion, stochastic systems and genetic algorithms which underpin these
markets' interests in distributed systems.
Scientific users who have long made extensive use of STRAND88 's features in
harnessing will find benefit in the new possibility for developing/running
applications on local networks of workstations before committing to lengthy
execution times on a supercomputer resource.
The educational market has realised the many benefits of teaching computer
science courses with "hands-on" experience of SUN equipment. The networked
SUN version of STRAND88 now allows the provision of realistic courses in
distributed computation, parallelism and concurrency, time-warp simulation
and ecological computer systems.
STRAND88 offers a wide range of paradigms for these problem areas. In
particular the object-oriented semantics enable peer-to-peer and cooperative
/competitive models of distributed problem solving in addition to the
client-server models that are currently available.
Users of STRAND88 reap the established benefits of the first language
designed for machine independent and scalable programming on multiprocessors
and multicomputers. The benefit of machine independence is that code can be
developed on one machine and executed on any other machine type without
modification or recompilation. The property of scalability means that programs
fit onto available hardware again without modification and adapt to the
economics of the user's resources. STRAND88 also brings the benefits of code
reuse by its ease of construction of "harnesses" which allow deployment of
established (sequential) C and Fortran codes over a multiprocessor. Such
harnesses are again machine independent and scalable.
Under the control of the networked STRAND88 system copies of the Strand system
are loaded onto the individual workstations which can then be treated as nodes
of a multicomputer. Work is distributed between the nodes by the execution of
Strand code. The networked version of STRAND88 permits the user to configure
more than one node of the multicomputer onto his host machine. This allows for
finer control of load-balancing and a more social use of a shared resource.
"This release of the networked version of STRAND88 is a step towards our goal
of the Distributed Programming Resource in the workplace," says Dr. Martin
Gittins, Technical Director. "In such a workplace, where large multiprocessing
machinery; number crunching equipment e.g. CRAY and networks of workstations,
can all be made accessible by STRAND88, programmers achieve the most timely
and economical use of the available compute resource".
The STRAND88 system is under continuous development and the second commercial
release of STRAND88, "Buckingham" is now being distributed. STRAND88 is
currently available on :
SUN workstations
all commercially significant transputer platforms
Sequent (balance,symmetry)
Encore Multimax, Cogent XTM
Intel iPSC/2 , iPSC/860,
BBN Butterfly
Macintosh II
workstations from NeXT, MIPS, Atari
For further details and any background info please contact
Strand Software Technologies USA
East Coast (703)683 7010
West Coast (503)642 0151
Rest of World +44 582 842424 (England)
email strand@sstl.uucp
--
=========================== MODERATOR ==============================
Steve Stevenson {steve,fpst}@hubcap.clemson.edu
Department of Computer Science, comp.parallel
Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634-1906 (803)656-5880.mabell