Future Parallel Computers: An Advanced Course, Pisa, Italy, June 9-20, 1986, Proceedings (lecture Notes In Computer Science)

This volume contains the proceedings of an ESPRIT Advanced Course entitled Future Parallel Computers held in Pisa, June 9-20, 1986. Interest in parallel computers has shown a dramatic increase in recent years. In the last six years, after Japan launched its national Fifth Generation Project to develop parallel computers for use in the 1990s, most other major industrial countries have started comparable national research programmes. For example, a significant proportion of the European Community's $1.3 billion ESPRIT Programme is devoted to future parallel computers. The competition between the national research programmes, to develop a new generation of computers, has been a catalyst for parallel computer development. In addition, many new parallel computer products are beginning to appear on the market. The 15 chapters of these proceedings are arranged in three parts: Firstly, tutorials on the main classes of parallel computers are presented; secondly, these classes of computers are illustrated by examining important parallel systems being developed; and lastly, important topics that influence all classes of parallel computers are studied in depth. Parallelism issues in multi — Style computers....Pages 1-34 Communicating process architecture: Transputers and occam....Pages 35-81 Fine-grain parallel computing: The dataflow approach....Pages 82-152 Reduction languages and reduction systems....Pages 153-184 Parallel inference machines....Pages 185-226 The architecture of DOOM....Pages 227-269 Towards a parallel architecture for functional languages....Pages 270-285 DDC delta driven computer a parallel machine for symbolic processing....Pages 286-298 Toward a high performance parallel inference machine — The intermediate stage plan of PIM —....Pages 299-320 Interconnection networks for massively parallel computer systems....Pages 321-348 Fault-tolerance in parallel architectures....Pages 349-372 Multi-level simulator for VLSI....Pages 373-386 An introduction to systolic architectures....Pages 387-400 Concurrency in a knowledge base....Pages 401-415 Computer architectures for artificial intelligence....Pages 416-492 The subject of these lectures is an analysis of some models and languages for concurrent programming, aiming to define a framework where their characteristics can be studied and compared. Organized by the University of Pisa on behalf of the European Strategic Programme for Research and Development in Information Technology (ESPRIT)