Announcing - Sisal Scientific Computing Initiative

Announcing


The Sisal Scientific Computing Initiative


The Computing Research Group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)
solicits proposals for the Sisal Scientific Computing Initiative (SSCI). The
Initiative awards free Cray C90 time and support to researchers willing to
develop their applications in Sisal, a functional language for parallel
numerical computation. Members of the Computing Research Group will provide
free educational material, training, consulting, and user services. The
previous call generated forty proposals and more than two dozen published
conference and journal papers.


SSCI is an outgrowth of the Sisal Language Project, a collaborative effort
by LLNL and Colorado State University, and funded in part by the Office of
Scientific Computing (Department of Energy), U.S. Army Research Office, and
LLNL. Sisal provides a clean and natural medium for expressing machine
independent, determinate, portable, parallel programs. The cost of writing,
debugging, and maintaining parallel applications in Sisal is equivalent to
the cost of writing, debugging, and maintaining sequential applications in
FORTRAN. Since the Optimizing Sisal Compiler eliminates the inefficiencies
typically associated with functional semantics, Sisal programs run as fast as
their Fortran counterparts. Sisal programmers enjoy the benefits of functional
programming--low program development costs, implicit parallelism, and
portability--without sacrificing performance.


This call for proposals is not limited to any group of researchers or
applications, and is intended to solicit collaborations with industry,
academia, and government workers. The previous call generated a wide variety
of proposals from all of these areas. The Initiative is particularly well
suited for academicians in the science and engineering disciplines, with
interests in large scale and parallel computation. We find that the effort
and start-up time required to become proficient in Sisal programming are
small; graduate students can write significant parallel code in a semester
of part-time effort. An annual international conference provides a forum to
publish and present research results realized through participation in the
Initiative.


Those interested in participating in this initiative should submit a one to
two page proposal to


Sisal Scientific Computing Initiative
Computing Research Group, L-306
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
P. O. Box 808
Livermore, CA 94551


Proposals should describe the research and explain how the work will benefit
from parallel execution on a Cray. For more information about the Sisal
Scientific Computing Initiative, please contact John Feo (feo@diego.llnl.gov)
at (510) 422-6389, or Tom DeBoni (deboni@diego.llnl.gov) at (510) 423-3793. We
look forward to hearing from you.


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