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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: GR/L00513/01
Title: EVALUATION OF UFO IMPLEMENTATIONS ON MEDIUM-SCALE APPLICATIONS
Principal Investigator: Watson, Professor I
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Researcher Co-Investigators:
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Department: Computer Science
Organisation: Victoria University of Manchester, The
Scheme: Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts: 14 June 1996 Ends: 13 August 1996 Value (£): 8,663
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Parallel Computing
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Summary on Grant Application Form
This proposal is to fund a visit to Manchester by Professor A.P.W Bohm of Colorado State University, in order to evaluate the implementations of the United Functions and Objects (UFO) programming language on medium scale standard benchmark applications. Professor Bohm is a world authority on such evaluations, and his visit would greatly aid our overall evaluation efforts.The work would be performed during a two month period form June 14the, 1996 to August 15th, 1996. During this period Professor Bohm is on unpaid leave from Colorado State University and would travel to the UK specifically to work full time on the project. UFO is a programming language designed and implemented at Manchester, which combines the best of functional and object-oriented programming technology. The major motivation is to produce a parallel programming language which is simple to sue and exploits the properties of implicit parallelism available form the functional programming approach wherever possible. However, in the interests of pragmatism, it allow state based computation and sequencing to be expressed in circumstances where these are important to the application, but is able to limit the extend to which these compromise the implicit approach by the use of object-oriented techniques.UFO has been used extensively within Manchester by the UFO project team - the UFO compiler is written in UFO together with a number of supporting tools. However, because it is a novel language and still in the process of development, it has not yet been exposed to an external use community to any great degree. It is felt that the language would benefit greatly from an assessment by an external user on realistic example although this is best done at Manchester where close support can be provided.Professor Bohm is uniquely qualified to make such an assessment. His major research interest is the use of novel parallel programming languages to express scientific computation. During the last five years he has worked closely with members of the user community in the USA on the use of various programming languages to write and evaluate realistic programs.UFO has developed from many years of research into parallel programming at Manchester using a variety of techniques. Its development was initially funded by EPSRC grant GR/J11089 which will produce a parallel implementation of the language on the KSR-1 machine in early 1996. More recently it has aroused international interest and a grant from the Japanese Real World Computing initiative is funding an implementation on the RWC-1 massively parallel machine.
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