Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!umd5!uflorida!gatech!hubcap!wucs1!conrad
From: wucs1!conrad@uunet.UU.NET (Conrad Cunningham)
Newsgroups: comp.parallel
Subject: Parallel Program Design
Message-ID: <1751@hubcap.UUCP>
Date: 26 May 88 12:59:28 GMT
Sender: fpst@hubcap.UUCP
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Approved: parallel@hubcap.clemson.edu

Readers of this news group may be interested in a book recently
published.  The book is:

	Parallel Program Design:  A Foundation
	by K. Mani Chandy and Jayadev Misra
	(both of the University of Texas--Austin)
	published by Addison-Wesley in 1988 

In the Forward C. A. R. Hoare says:

	It is not often that we can welcome the advent of a new theory
    of programming.  Twelve years ago, E. W. Dijkstra published his
    DISCIPLINE OF PROGRAMMING, which is still a definitive source-book on
    the development of sequential algorithms.  And now Chandy and Misra
    have shown how Dijkstra's methods, and more recent developments, can
    be generalized to distributed and concurrent algorithms.  Their work
    deserves the warmest welcome.

In the Preface the authors state:

	The thesis of this book is that the unity of the programming
    task transcends differences between the architectures on which
    programs can be executed and the application domains from which
    problems are drawn.  Our goal is to show how programs can be developed
    systematically for a variety of architectures and applications.  The
    foundation, upon which program development is based, is a simple
    theory:  a model of computation and an associated proof system.

	In the book the authors present their philosophy of
programming, their UNITY programming notation and proof system, and
their methodologies for concurrent program development.  They then
apply their theory to a variety of example "applications" and
"architectures".  The discussion of examples probably makes up 2/3 of
the 500 pages of text.

Conrad Cunningham			conrad@wucs1.wustl.edu
Department of Computer Science
Washington University in St. Louis