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Seminar announcement
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