Parallel Processing Computers Books - Page 23

Concurrent Systems (2nd Edition) (International Computer Science Series)

J. Bacon

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 2.5 of 5

Excellent content, but poor writing. 3 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

In terms of its content, this is definitely the best introductory text to operating system and concurrency. Unfortunately, Jean Bacon's writing style has caused tremendous headaches among her students at Cambridge. This is how one student used to put it:"Every word has its meaning, but when they were put together, they make no sense in Jean Bacon's book!" My personal experience was that I had to read the same paragraph at least 3 to 4 times in order to understand the message. In short, this book is for serious reader only. You need all the patience, and determination in order to finish reading this book. (like us, who had to answer the exam questions she set!)

Well intentioned, poorly executed 2 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I have great respect for the author of this book, as she undoubtedly knows her stuff (hence two stars, not one), however, she would have been well advised to have employed an editor before the final draft was published. The intent of each section is lost in a fog of cross-referencing and over-explanation. Get this book if: a) It's a required text b) You're a genius with time to kill c) You're extremely patient and keen to learn d) If the latest edition has been substantially edited

Editorial Review:

A text for undergraduates on operating systems courses that focus on the central role of concurrency in modern software technology & on new insights into the integrated nature of modern software systems for programmers, designers, & engineers. Paper. DLC: Parallel processing (Electronic computers).

Practical Parallel Processing: An Introduction to Problem Solving in Parallel

Alan Chalmers, John Tidmus

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Reconfigurable Processor Array A Bit Sliced Parallel Computer (USA)

A. Rushton

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Handbook of Process Algebra

A. Ponse, S.A. Smolka

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Helpful overview 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Process algebra is not only of interest in mathematics, theoretical computer science, and mathematical logic but is of enormous importance in applications. Most of these applications have been in business process modeling, models of concurrent processing, and computational biology. This book gives a fairly comprehensive overview of the main approaches to process algebra, but emphasizing theoretical foundations and not practical applications. One of the process algebras discussed in the book is the pi-calculus, this discussion appearing in Part 3 of the book by Joachim Parrow. This article was the only one read by this reviewer, so the commentary here will deal with it exclusively.

The pi-calculus has been the subject of an enormous amount of research in the last fifteen years, and has found its way into practical applications. It is introduced by the author as a mathematical model of processes with interconnections that change as they interact. The computational paradigm in the pi-calculus is fairly simple: a computation consists of the transfer of a communication link between processes. The process receiving the link can then utilize it to engage in interactions with other processes or agents. If one approaches the pi-calculus with a knowledge of the lambda calculus underlying functional computation, one will find that there are many parts of the pi-calculus that admit an interpretation in the lambda calculus.

There is much more to the pi-calculus however, and the author has given the reader a general discussion of its theoretical foundations. His approach is fairly clear, with many examples given, and he devotes separate sections to the discussion of some of the variants of the pi-calculus. This allows readers to skip these sections if they only want to learn concentrate on the pi-calculus as it was originally conceived (by the researcher Robin Milner).

One of the first things that the author clears up concerns the view that pi-calculus is merely a value-passing process algebra (with the values being the links). Noting that the things that are transferred do not have any internal structure may reinforce this belief, he says. To counter this skepticism he notes that that expressive power of the pi-calculus comes from its ability to migrate `local scopes.' As in other process algebras, one can define a private or `restricted' link between processes in the pi-calculus, but this link can be sent by the processes that share it to another process that can use it. The scope of an object must go along with the object when it is transferred between the processes, and this makes the pi-calculus more than just a value-passing process algebra he argues.

As in other process algebras some processes in the pi-calculus should be viewed as essentially the same if they have the same effective behavior. There are many notions of equivalence of processes in the pi-calculus, but the first one that is discussed by the author concerns the `structural congruence' of processes. This notion is a purely syntactical one, where two processes are structurally congruent if they are the same under a change of bound names (called alpha-conversion in the lambda calculus). Structural congruence also enforces the parallel processes as an Abelian group, and has various scope extension laws.

Another notion of behavioural equivalence that arises in the pi-calculus (as in many other process algebras) is that of `strong bisimilarity.' Two processes are bisimilar if they can be related by a bisimulation, i.e. if they can both perform the same actions and essentially mimic the transitions of each other. However bisimilarity is not a congruence since it is not preserved by the input prefix, and so this motivates the introduction of `strong congruence'. Two agents are strongly congruent if they are bisimilar for all substitutions. The author proves that strong congruence is the largest congruence in bisimilarity. Of modern recent interest is the notion of `barbed' congruence, which is discussed by the author in this article and which involves the inability of an observer to find out if an action is enabled on a given channel. This is a `barbed bisimulation' and two agents are `barbed congruent' if they are related by a barbed bisimulation for all contexts.

The operational semantics of the pi-calculus is given by a labeled transition system. The transitions are labeled by a collection of actions: the internal action, the free output actions, and the input actions, and no actions are possible for a restricted name as subject. But there is also a notion of `bound output' action that the author explains in some detail, where a local name can be transmitted and its scope extended to the recipient.

Editorial Review:

Hardbound. Process Algebra is a formal description technique for complex computer systems, especially those involving communicating, concurrently executing components. It is a subject that concurrently touches many topic areas of computer science and discrete math, including system design notations, logic, concurrency theory, specification and verification, operational semantics, algorithms, complexity theory, and, of course, algebra.
This Handbook documents the fate of process algebra since its inception in the late 1970's to the present. It is intended to serve as a reference source for researchers, students, and system designers and engineers interested in either the theory of process algebra or in learning what process algebra brings to the table as a formal system description and verification technique. The Handbook is divided into six parts spanning a total of 19 self-contained Chapters.
The organization is as follows. Part 1, consisting of

Implementation of Non-Strict Functional Programming Languages (Research Monographs in Parallel and Distributed Computing)

Kenneth R. Traub

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Editorial Review:

Modern "non-strict" functional programming languages are a powerful means of programming highly parallel computers, but are intrinsically difficult to compile well because decisions about ordering of subcomputations must be taken at compile time. This book represents a new technique for compiling such languages by partitioning a program into sequential threads. While the interleaving of threads can vary at run time, within each thread the order is fixed.

A program is compiled by analyzing its data dependences, and developing from that a set of partitioning constraints. These practical algorithms are founded on a new theory of data dependence and ordering within functional programs, which defines dependence graphs in terms of a rewrite-rule operational semantics for the language.

By attacking the ordering problem directly, the book departs from previous approaches that obtain partitioning as a byproduct of optimizing lazy evaluation, and cleanly separates partitioning from other code generation issues. Furthermore, the method is flexible enough to produce both lazy code and also a less restrictive "lenient" variant which allows larger threads with only a slight decrease in expressive power. Code generation and optimization are explored in depth for both uniprocessor and multiprocessor targets.

Kenneth R. Traub is a researcher with the Motorola Cambridge Research Center.

Contents: Introduction. Background - Functional Language Compilers. Lenient Evaluation. Functional Quads. Code Generation. A Syntactic Theory of Data Dependence. Dependence-Based Partitioning. Conclusion.

Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics: 7th International Conference, PPAM 2007, Gdansk, Poland, September 9-12, 2007, Revised Selected papers (Lecture ... Computer Science and General Issues)

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Editorial Review:

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics, PPAM 2007, held in Gdansk, Poland, in September 2007.

The 63 revised full papers of the main conference presented together with 85 revised workshop papers were carefully reviewed and selected from over 250 initial submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on parallel/distributed architectures and mobile computing, numerical algorithms and parallel numerics, parallel and distributed non-numerical algorithms, environments and tools for as well as applications of parallel/distributed/grid computing, evolutionary computing, meta-heuristics and neural networks. The volume proceeds with the outcome of 11 workshops and minisymposia dealing with novel data formats and algorithms for dense linear algebra computations, combinatorial tools for parallel sparse matrix computations, grid applications and middleware, large scale computations on grids, models, algorithms and methodologies for grid-enabled computing environments, scheduling for parallel computing, language-based parallel programming models, performance evaluation of parallel applications on large-scale systems, parallel computational biology, high performance computing for engineering applications, and the minisymposium on interval analysis.

Scalable Shared-Memory Multiprocessing

Daniel E. Lenoski, Wolf-Dietrich Weber

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Wonderful Treatise on Cache Coherence 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

This book on cache coherence and shared memory multi-processor systems should be on every OS developer's desk; in fact, it should be well worn and marked up with lots of highlighting, underlining, and phrases of "Oh so THAT's how it works!" written in the margins.

The authors do a wonderful job describing the principles of cache coherence and the difference between message passing (or distributed) systems and shared memory systems. The rest of the book, of course, is spent on the latter, and the authors delve into such topics as: memory latency (and how to reduce/hide latency), NUMA and COMA architectures (and different interconnect networks), memory prefetch, memory bandwidth, various cache consistency models, and a lot of examples of various applications and the cache invalidation patterns those applications exhibit. And that's all just in the first 3 chapters of the book!

The book describes the architectures of several of the scalable shared memory systems that existed in the mid-90's, and then it goes on to describe a system called DASH that was implemented by the authors and folks at Stanford. At first I thought I was going to be put off by the focus on DASH, but it actually had the opposite effect. The chapters on DASH did a great job of going through all the details and clearly showing me how all this works "in practice."

I'm a software guy, and this book was recommended to me by a hardware guy, and I think it's a must for anyone doing software development for large complex multi-processor systems.

The writing is very clear and straight-forward, though it's not something I can read while the television is on (in other words, I've got to concentrate while reading this book).

Not only would this book be useful as a college CS Architecture textbook, but it's proving to be highly useful in the workplace!

Editorial Review:

Dr. Lenoski and Dr. Weber have experience with leading-edge research and practical issues involved in implementing large-scale parallel systems. They were key contributors to the architecture and design of the DASH multiprocessor. Currently, they are involved with commercializing scalable shared-memory technology.

Concepts Design and Performance Analysis of a Parallel Prolog Machine (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)

Joachim Beer

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Editorial Review:

This monograph presents a novel execution model for the parallel execution of standard sequential Prolog. In this execution model Prolog procedure calls can be efficiently pipelined, and the author shows how even fully deterministic Prolog programs can be effectively mapped onto the proposed architecture. The design is based on a highly optimized abstract Prolog specific instruction set. A special feature of this work is a sophisticated classification scheme for Prolog variables which substantially reduces the overhead for unification with occur-check. To support the model an architecture consisting of a circular pipeline of independent processors has been designed. This pipeline has been designed to work as a co-processor to a UNIX based workstation. In contrast to other attempts to execute sequential Prolog in parallel, the proposed model does not restrict the use of any of the standard Prolog language features. The book gives a full account of the execution model, the system architecture, and the abstract Prolog instruction set.

Efficient Parallel Algorithms

Alan Gibbons, Wojciech Rytter

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Editorial Review:

This largely self-contained text is an introduction to the field of efficient parallel algorithms and to the techniques for efficient parallelism, that presumes no special knowledge of parallel computers or particular mathematics. The book emphasizes designing algorithms within the timeless and abstracted context of a high-level programming language rather than within highly specific computer architectures. This is an approach that concentrates on the essence of algorithmic theory, determining and taking advantage of the inherently parallel nature of certain types of problems. The authors present regularly-used techniques and a range of algorithms including some of the more celebrated ones. Nonspecialists considering entering the field of parallel algorithms, as well as advanced undergraduate or postgraduate students of computer science and mathematics will find this book helpful.

Evolution of Parallel Cellular Machines: The Cellular Programming Approach (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)

Moshe Sipper

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Editorial Review:

Collective systems, abounding in nature, have evolved by natural selection to exhibit striking problem-solving capacities. Employing simple yet versatile parallel cellular models, coupled with evolutionary computation techniques, this volume explores the issue of constructing man-made systems that exhibit characteristics like those occuring in nature. Parallel cellular machines hold potential both scientifically, as vehicles for studying phenomena of interest in areas such as complex adaptive systems and artificial life, and practically, enabling the construction of novel systems, endowed with evolutionary, reproductive, regenerative, and learning capabilities. This volume examines the behavior of such machines, the complex computation they exhibit, and the application of artificial evolution to attain such systems.