eugene@pioneer.arc.nasa.gov (Eugene N. Miya) (06/18/88)
Returning yesterday from the Intl. COnf. on Dist. Comp. Systems,
I ran into Computer Literacy Bookstore [San Jose location] to be
flooded with a slew of books of parallelism. I broke down the other
day and puchased Robbie Babb's book because the Government library
service is too slow. It's very survey, a collection of Grad student papers
put together, so its shallow, but does give some sense of syntax.
The two chapters to watch out for: the IBM 3090 chapter on EPEX
is disappointing (alan Karp did all the actual programming, not the students)
[How important is it to have "hands on?" I think it's essential
after using two of the Japanese machines]
[BTW: friends at AT&T and E&S made me go those other days. The Devil made
me do it...]
The other significant book is Geoffery Fox's vol. 1 of his new
book on concurrent processors. This book LOOKS okay, but knowing
of his work from the SMP days, I am certain there are some idiosyncracies
with this book.
There are at least a dozen lesser works with authors I'm unfamiliar
with. Most significant perhaps is Mary Mace's book (PhD thesis)
on Memory Access Patterns for Parallel Processors. The thing to note
about this book is that she works for IBM. I have all these books
on order with our library, I would never and could never buy all of
them out of my pocket. I also fear that I will miss some of these books
since I don't have a pipeline from all these publishers.
Another gross generalization from
--eugene miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@aurora.arc.nasa.gov
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