Declarative Systems & Software Engineering
Newsletter
Issue 19
- 20th March 1995
Editor - Hugh Glaser
Contents:
- Editorial
- Today's Seminar
- OPERA - Vicki Sivess
- Prograph Lunch
- Trip Report - Hugh Glaser
- HPCC Seminar
More good news. Further to last week's article about Pieter Hartel,
I am delighted to report that
Michael Butler (who gave that excellent seminar on refinement)
has been offered a
Lecturship in the Department. He has indicated that he will accept, starting
later this year.
And yet more delight. Stewart Maclean has accepted the research post on the
GraphIcsla project .
He will start on 1st April.
Trevor Smedley arrives today, for three weeks.
Department awayday on Friday, so academic staff at Chilworth.
The following seminar will be at 1:00 on Monday 20th March in ES1 (note venue).
Visual Languages for the Design and Development of Structured Objects
Dr Trevor Smedley
Technical University of Nova Scotia
Abstract
The design of abstract or physical structures has much in common with the
design of software structures, particularly when the structure in question
has a mechanical or computational behaviour, such as a digital circuit.
Like programming language systems, design systems must have expressive
power sufficient for representing any design, a simulation mechanism for
debugging the artifact under construction, and a production mechanism; for
example, compilation for a programming language, or chip fabrication for a
VLSI design system.
Since specifying complex devices requires repetitive and conditional
structures analogous to iteration, recursion and conditionals in programs,
languages for designing complex devices are usually based on textual
programming languages, for example VHDL for VLSI design. The advent of
full-featured visual programming languages, however, raises the possibility
we consider here: that mechanisms used to visually express compact and
powerful program structures could be generalised to design languages.
We have now heard officially that our bid to carry out part of the
work on the Eureka OPERA (Open PCTE for Environments, Repositories and
Applications) project, led by ICL, has been accepted. Stephen
Hellberg, who currently works on the PPPE project will be working on
the project from April 1st to the end of the year. He will be moving
into the DSSE group, and will bring to the project his experience of
tool integration using PCTE.
Prographers meet at 1pm in the MB Common Room for Beer and Pizza.
I spent Tuesday and a bit of Wednesday at a meeting of the EPSRC's
PPECC
(Parallel Processing in Engineering Community Club) at Cosener's
House in Abingdon. The topic was
"Parallel and Distributed: Convergence or Divergence?".
Generally interesting (espcially Denis' talk?!); I have the position papers
for those who want a read.
It was one of those meetings where the EPSRC is actually
inviting the "research community" to tell them how to spend money.
I missed the conclusion (I had a lecture in Southampton),
but Denis knows a bit more.
One snippet: the responsive mode has meant that they are less than
inundated with application.
Cosener's House is very comfortable, but they do fill up the wine glasses
a bit frequently!
Message Passing with MPI and PVM
23rd March 1995, 09.00am to 5.00pm
Copy deadline: 5pm Friday for Monday's newsletter, but send the articles
any time.
Hugh Glaser
Declarative Systems & Software Engineering Group
Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton