Corrected Compiler Workshop Call

                            --- Call for Workshop Participation ---


                                Compilation of Symbolic Languages
                                            for Parallel Computers
                                            October 31--November 1


                                            in conjunction with
                          International Logic Programming Symposium
                                                  October 28--30




                              Ian Foster (itf@mcs.anl.gov)
                              Math & Computer Science Division
                              Argonne National Laboratory
                              Argonne IL 60439, USA


                              and


                              Evan Tick (tick@cs.uoregon.edu)
                              Dept. of Computer Science
                              University of Oregon
                              Eugene OR 97403, USA




We invite all researchers actively studying compilation techniques for
parallel, symbolic languages, to participate in this 1.5 day workshop. The
workshop will begin on Thursday afternoon, and continue all day on Friday.


The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers working on the
compilation of logic, functional, and procedural programming language for
parallel computers. Each of these communities is faced with the problem of
inferring efficient memory management and scheduling decisions. Each has made
some progress, primarily on shared-memory parallel computers. In the process,
many techniques have been discovered, developed, and rediscovered. This
workshop is meant primarily as a forum for the discussion of these techniques
and surveys of relationships between similar techniques developed in different
communities. A secondary role is to stimulate discussion of the developments
required to permit effective compilation for large-scale, distributed memory
parallel computers.


The fundamental problems facing researchers interested in compilation of
logic, functional, and procedural programming languages for parallel computers
are essentially the same. However, differences in the basic programming
paradigms have led to the communities emphasizing different aspects of the
parallel compilation problem. For example, parallel logic and functional
languages provide dataflow-like formalisms in which control dependencies are
unimportant. Hence, an important focus has been on techniques that try to
infer when sequential control flow can safely be imposed. Granularity
analysis for scheduling is a related problem. The single-assignment property
(central to the dataflow model) leads to a need for analysis of memory use in
order to detect opportunities for reuse. Much of the work in each of these
areas relies on the use of abstract interpretation techniques and similar
methods.


In contrast, research in procedural languages has emphasized the problem of
inferring data dependencies in order to determine when sequential control flow
can safely be relaxed. A related area of research is the automatic
partitioning and distribution of data structures. This topic has not been
addressed in the logic and functional programming communities but is important
on large-scale parallel computers.


On large-scale parallel computers, the difficulty of automatic inference of
good schedules has led to an interest in application-specific compilation. In
this approach, a program is automatically restructured to produce a new
program that will apply some programmer-specified scheduling strategy on a
particular parallel computer.


There is clearly both a commonality of interests between researchers in these
different fields, and large differences as to emphasis and techniques. We
hope that this workshop will encourage at least an appraisal of the
fundamental problems. We should point out that an understanding of
compilation techniques developed by different groups is also important when
programming paradigms are combined. For example, compilers for logic
languages that permit incorporation of functional or procedural components can
benefit from information provided by functional and procedural compilers.


We solicit papers on compile-time implementation issues related directly to
parallelism: i.e., static analysis and restructuring techniques allowing more
efficient parallel execution. This workshop does not cover parallel
architectures or the implementation of parallel systems. Submissions in these
areas will be directed to the corresponding workshops, and may be presented in
overlapping sessions.


The fundamental problems in parallel compilation are independent of particular
languages and programming paradigms; we hope that this workshop will encourage
an appraisal of these problems and the recognition of common solutions.


Please send a 1--3 page abstract of research to tick@cs.uoregon.edu or
itf@mcs.anl.gov by September 13, 1991. Include your address, e-mail address
and work telephone number. Notification will be given soon after.
--

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