Thursday, 28/Friday, 29 April, 1995 @ 1.00 pm
INRIA @ Sophia Antipolis
The members of the Working Group present were as follows: Malcolm Rigg - ICL, Heather Liddell - LPAC, Chair, Alistair McEwan - LPAC, Matthew Holford - LPAC, who took the minutes, Denis Caromel - INRIA, Philippe Mussi - INRIA, Jonathon Poole - UCL.
Apologies were received from Jean-Philippe Solvay of CAP Gemini, Richard Kaufmann of DEC Ltd, Peter Dzwig of LPAC and from Graham Roberts and Russel Winder of UCL.
HL opened proceedings by thanking INRIA for hosting the meeting and outlining the objectives for the two days of the meeting.
Amendments were made and agreed by the members present.
Following this discussion it was decided that in addition to publicising the document on the WWW that physical documents should also be distributed and an action (Action 1) was placed upon MH to ensure that updated documents should be distributed in this way. JP mentioned that UCL had been having problems receiving email messages. MH said that he would look into the problem.
An action (Action 2) was placed upon AM to set up a page on the EUROPA WWW server to document all changes to the Roadmap.
JP asserted that several parts of the draft standard are of direct relevance to parallel and distributed computing, such as Run Time Type Identification. One part of the draft not very well defined at present is the specification of a numeric array called "valarrary", similar to Fortran 90 arrays and specifically designed to allow efficient implementation on parallel machines.
This included a description of the objectives of C++ on the DAP, a summary of the relevant C++ features, the development steps taken and diagrams showing the distribution of parallel objects and the task interface. Copies of the presentation slides were distributed at the meeting.
DC had been following the progress of the HPC++ project and has contact with the people involved in it.
HPC++ is a project to define a set of standards for parallel object oriented computing based on C++. Their goal is to provide complete support fo the industry standards for user libraries, distributed computing and interoperability tools and to extend the language only where necessary to suport explicit parallel control.
The specification should consist of two levels:
Level 0 specification will consist of standard C++ together with a parallel implementation and extension of the C++ Standard Template Library for parallel data structures and data parallel style execution.
Level 1 specification will consist of more general extension to the C++ language to support a complete set of control structures and type extensions. Many of the language extensions may be based on a meta-level architecture.
HL opened the discussion by giving a presentation of a proposed structure for EUROPA C++ put forward by LPAC. further details were to be circulated following the discussion at the meeting.
DC raised objections to the proposal. He was concerned that the structure was too closely tied to the message passing model. He proposed an alternative model based on Meta Object Protocols (MOP), which could encompass MIMD, SPMD and SIMD models of parallelism.
Drafting of Overall Recommendation for circulation and discussion at the next Plenary Meeting.
It was decided that the Overall Recommendation could not be drafted in advance of the position papers being introduced.
It was decided that the revision of the Roadmap should be deferred until the position papers had been prepared by UCL and INRIA. This was to be carried out by 20 May, 1995. The revision of the Roadmap was to be carried out following this during the next Architecture SIG meeting in July (see below).
It was decided to hold the next Architecture SIG meeting in the first week of July, venue TBA and defer the next scheduled Plenary meeting until early September, this Plenary meeting to be held in Brussels.
Russel Winder was actioned (Action 3) in his absence to finalised the details of his trip to the United States.
HL and MH were actioned (Action 4) to follow up contacts at SOFTPAR and EPOCH with HL to approach GMD at HPCN95. Meanwhile, JP was actioned (Action 5) to contact Dietrich Boles (QPC++) at Oldenburg.
A private Web page with details of who has been contacted and by whom and any other information relevant is to be set up and AM was actioned (Action 6) to carry this out.
AM was actioned (Action 7) to ascertain the status of the other SIGs with regard to the membership and by whom they will be driven.
AM was actioned (Action 8) to prepare a publicly available WWW database in which to store the information once collected. This database is to be contributed to on a global basis.
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