ParCo 97
by Roland Völpel
The international conference Parallel Computing 1997 was held in
the Wissenschaftszentrum, Bonn from 16 to 19 September 1997. It was organised
by GMD, Institut for Algorithms and Scientific Computing, Germany, in association
with ParCo Conferences, The Netherlands.
The Parallel Computing conferences were first held in 1983 in Berlin.
Since then this conference was held every two years (except in 1987) in
various European cities. ParCo97 was attended by more than 170 participants,
who came from worldwide academia (ca. 30 countries) and industry. The running
costs of these conferences is covered by registration fees and industrial
sponsoring.
The main topics covered at this year's conference were algorithms, hardware
and software developments, and applications. Application issues dominated
the program.
The detailed topics discussed during the various sessions were:
- sophisticated methods of mathematical solvers for industrial applications
and science - new program paradigms, algorithms of automatic parallelizations
for structured and unstructured problems incl. AI methods
- shared memory, distributed memory and distributed shared memory computing
- heterogenous and geographically distributed computing
- metacomputing
- communication architectures, including developments in networking (Internet/Intranet)
and system internal communication architectures.
The increasing synergy between high-speed computing and multimedia techniques
was highlighted. Multimedia technologies are increasingly being used for
scientific visualisation of large data volumes resulting from, for example,
large scale simulations. Parallel computing is also increasingly becoming
essential to meet the real-time computing demands of high quality virtual
reality systems, data mining in large data bases and multimedia information
processing.
The increasing use of parallel computers for industrial applications
was illustrated by the presentation of the EU funded EUROPORT project.
The efficiency of such solutions was demonstrated by the presented results
obtained with a number of parallel programs. The increasing use of standard
software libraries and tools greatly reduces the time needed to develop
parallel codes for industrial applications.
The exhibition and papers presented by a number of companies, such as
ASCEND, Computing Center of the University of Stuttgart (RUS), DEC, HP,
PALLAS, PARSYTEC, SGI, Research Center Jülich (FZJ), SUN and Visual
Numerics Inc., gave an overview of the future developments which can be
expected in the market place. A clear trend to smaller and more affordable
parallel systems, built around workstation clusters and multiprocessor
systems, will greatly increase the number of parallel systems used in the
industrial, financial and service sectors.
In total some 170 papers and posters were submitted. Of these, 99 were
finally accepted for publication in the proceedings. Papers and posters
presented at the conference are not automatically accepted for publication
in the proceedings. All presentations were reviewed during the conference
and only accepted papers will be published.
Four invited speakers gave talks on the state-of-the-art. These were:
- Geoffrey Fox, USA: Future of High Performance Computing: Java on PetaFlop
Computers
- Argy Krikelis, United Kingdom: Parallel Multimedia Computing
- Andreas Reuter, Germany: Parallel Database Techniques in Decision Support
and Data Mining
- Klaus Stüben, Germany: Europort, Commercial Benefit of Using Parallel
Technology.
Papers on future trends in parallel computer developments were presented
by a number of companies in an industrial session. These papers are also
considered for publication in the proceedings.
The proceedings will be published in the series Advances in Parallel
Computing by Elsevier, Amsterdam. Publication is planned for the second
quarter of 1998. In addition to the book publication two special issues
based on selected papers presented at the conference will be published
by Parallel Computing journal.
The conference was opened by Prof. Dennis Tsichritzis, executive head
of GMD and Prof. Laermann, Member of Parliament, and the Chair of the
Conference Prof. Joubert.
A panel discussion, chaired by Oliver McBryan (USA), considered the
theme 'Parallel Computing and the Evolution of Cyberspace'. The provocative
statement was that the interest in parallel computing is being shifting
to multimedia and web oriented activities, but it was agreed in the discussion
that both fields are actually growing together. Indeed, parallel computing
has penetrated all fields of computing and data processing, but substantial
research problems still have to be solved. In that respect, parallel computing
is still in the center of computing science and computational science and
engineering.
Participant evaluation forms indicate that the conference was highly
successful and motivated the conference committee to prepare the next similar
conference in 1999. This encouraging result could only be achieved through
the support given to the Conference Committee by the members of the Program
Committee, who also acted as Session Chairmen and Reviewer, and the GMD,
Institute of Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI). The conference
committee is also indebted to the many companies and organisations who
supported this venture with their generous financial contributions.
Please contact:
Roland Völpel - GMD
Tel: +49 2241 14 2050
E-mail: roland.voelpel@gmd.de
