🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello everybody,

We are looking for a parallel programming environment to support the
development of a large scale parallel numerical application for a
massively parallel system. Ideally we would like to have integrated 
tools for (formal or semi-formal) specification of software, programming
in Fortran and/or C, and verification. The latter would include a proof
that the implementation is deadlockfree and does not suffer from starvation. 
Note that we are not so much interested in parallellisation tools 
(which help you make an existing sequential code parallel).

So far we have found CODE, PIE, POKER, MUPPET, PPSE and Integral. Only
the former two seem applicable. We have no reports of POKER and MUPPET
after 1988 and PPSE and Integral seem to be only in research stadium.
If there is anyone who can supply hints to other environments or who 
has experience with any of the ones mentioned above, please send a note.

We have the feeling that so far, none of the environments truly supports
the formal specification of parallel software. Therefore, we are thinking
about having a separate environment for specification (the output of
which should preferably be usable in our programming environment). We are
considering RAISE and LOTOS. The latter seems to be aimed at the specification
of protocols and might therefore be less appropriate here. 

Other specification methods that we considered are CSP, Unity and VDM, but
we did not come across any (stable) environment that supports the former two.

We welcome any notes about other specification tools for parallel 
processing and about experience with any of them.

I will be happy to summarize the reactions to interested parties.

Regards,

Mark

p.s. This letter has already been posted in the newsgroup comp.parallel.

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Mark Roest				Eric ten Cate
TWI/TA					TWI/TA
Delft University of Technology		Delft University of Technology
Mekelweg 4				Mekelweg 4
2628 CD DELFT				2628 CD DELFT
the Netherlands				the Netherlands
roest@dutind4.tudelft.nl		tencate@dutind4.tudelft.nl
					tencate@ph.tn.tudelft.nl
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