Project Seminar "Parallel and Distributed Software and Algorithms"

Wolfgang Schreiner <Wolfgang.Schreiner@risc.uni-linz.ac.at>

315.538, SS 1998 (Start: March 11)
Wed 14:00-15:30, HA 105

Wednesday, March 11

Time: 15:30, Room: meeting room Hagenberg.

1. Seminar Organization
   Contents, scheduling of presentations.
2. "DAJ -- A Toolkit for Distributed Algorithms in Java"
   Talk by Wolfgang Schreiner (45+ mins).

Wednesday, March 18

1. "Distributed Snapshots -- The Chandy-Lamport Algorithm"
   Talk by Wolfgang Schreiner (90 mins): how to determine a consistent global snapshot of an asynchronously executing network; implementatin in DAJ.

Wednesday, March 25

1. "The CFLP System"
   Talk by Mircea Marin (45+ mins): a functional-logic language with constraint solving capabilities and its distributed implementation by Mathematica processes.

Wednesday, April 1

1. "Fisher's Protocol: A Verification with Process Algebra"
   Talk by Yaroslav Usenko (30+ mins): modeling of a communication protocol and its verification.
2. "Hybrid I/O Automata"
   Talk by Antonin Tesacec (30+ mins): specification of hybrid I/O automata.

Wednesday, April 22

1. "Infospheres"
   Talk by Harald Deischinger (45+ mins): report on the CalTech system for distributed Java programming and its installation in the RISC-Linz computer network.

Wednesday, April 29

Cancelled.

Wednesday, May 6

1. "Temporal Logic Verification of a Distributed Algorithm"
   Talk by Christian Mittermaier (45+ mins): formal verification of a distributed algorithm based on a temporal logic framework.

Wednesday, May 13

1. "Distributed Maple"
   Announcemnt of Wolfgang Schreiner about the implementation of a distributed Maple variant (5 mins).
2. "CORBA Fundamentals"
   Talk by Karl Traunmüller (45+ mins): fundamentals of distributed object technology and of CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture).

Wednesday, May 20

1. "Distributed Design Patterns"
   Talk by Alexander Podoplelov (45+ mins).

Wednesday, May 27

1. Imperative Program Specialization: A Case Study
   Robert Glueck (DIKU, University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

   Partial evaluation is an automatic program optimization technique, similar in concept to, but in several ways different from optimizing compilers. Optimization is achieved by changing the times at which computations are performed. A partial evaluator can be used to overcome losses in performance that are due to highly parameterized, modular software.

   This talk gives a short introduction to program specialization by off-line partial evaluation. We show how a binding-time analysis can be used to identify potential sources for specialization in numerical algorithms. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach we used an automatic partial evaluator for Fortran which we developed. Results for several well-known numerical algorithms show that some remarkable speedup factors can be obtained.

   Joint work with R.Baier, R.Nakashige, R.Zoechling.

Wednesday, June 3

1. "Active Objects"
   Talk by Alexander Podoplelov (45+ mins) about some distributed design pattern.
2. "Temporal Logic Specification of Real-Time Systems"
   Talk by Wolfgang Schreiner about a paper by Lamport et al (30+ mins).

Wednesday, June 10

1. "STeP: The Standford Temporal Logic Prover"
   Talk by Christian Mittermaier (45+ mins), see the STeP documentation.
2. "Parallel Convex Hull Construction"
   Talk by Harald Deischinger (30+ mins) about the implementation of a parallel algorithm from computational geometry in DAJ.

Wednesday, June 17

1. "CORBA Programming"
   Talk by Karl Traunmüller (45+ mins): programming with the CORBA installation in the RISC-Linz network.
2. "The CFLP System"
   Talk by Mircea Marin (30+ mins) about the current state of the system.

Wednesday, June 24

1. Algebraic Verification of a Distributed Summation Algorithm
   Talk by Yarislav Usenko (45+ mins).

Wednesday, July 1

1. "Synchronizers"
   Talk by Antonin Tesacec about the transformation of synchronous network algorithms to asynchronous network algorithms (45+ mins).