Concurrent Systems

Please contact Jonathan Bowen if you know of relevant on-line information not included here or would like to maintain information on a particular topic.

This document contains some pointers to information on concurrent systems available around the world on the World Wide Web (WWW or W3), a global hypermedia system providing worldwide information. Links for accessing online information in the following categories are available:

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Electronic repositories

The comp.parallel newsgroup discusses parallel processing. See also comp.parallel.pvm on the PVM distributed computing environment and comp.parallel.mpi on the MPI (Message Passing Interface) standard for parallel machines.
Parallel Computing Archive at HENSA/Unix including occam, the transputer, and journal information.
Supercomputing & Parallel Computing information from the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA.
Wang's Bookself on Parallel Computing including searches for "parallel".
A list of Supercomputing and Parallel Computing Research Groups.
Parallel Processing in Engineering Community Club, UK.
occam and the transputer.
Parallel Tools Consortium including Parallel Tools Projects Around the World.
Distributed / Meta - Computing.
Search for "concurent systems" in a Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies available on the Internet.
Concurrency Group in the Stanford Computer Science Department Theory Division led by Vaughan Pratt. See also papers on foundations of concurrency (second sourced in the UK).
PSP Group (Programs, Specifications and Proofs), University of Texas, Austin, including information on UNITY.
Parallel and distributed computing information including a Distributed Systems Computer Science course by Pradip Srimani, Colorado State University, USA.
PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine).
Parallel Supercomputing, Distributed Computing, Parallel Applications and Parallel Tools and Algorithms in the Theory, Computational Science and Computing (TCSC) programme at Daresbury Laboratory, UK.
Asynchronous Logic Home Page, Manchester, UK.

If you are searching for on-line Technical Reports, you may find the Unified Computer Science Technical Report Index helpful. E.g., see a list of Technical Reports concerned with concurrency, concurrent, parallel and distributed systems. See also a list of Computer Science Technical Reports archive sites.

Research groups and centers

Centre for Concurrent Systems and VLSI, School of Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics, South Bank University, London, UK.
Concurrent Systems Architecture Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.
Concurrent VLSI Architecture (CVA) Group, MIT, USA.
The Linda Group, Yale University, USA: parallel and distributed computing based around the Linda programming language.
Formal methods for high assurance concurrent software from the Experimental Computation Laboratory at the University of Missouri - Rolla, USA.
Distributed Systems research at Digital Systems Research Center.
Parallel and Distributed Computing at the Software Engineering Research Group, Department of Computer Science, Michigan State University, USA.
Large-scale Parallel Software Group, MIT, USA.
Oxford Parallel, set up to stimulate the profitable use of parallel processing within industry and commerce in the UK. See the BSP Library
Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre.
Northeast Parallel Architectures Center, Syracuse University, USA.
Concurrent and Distributed Systems research group at University of St. Andrews, Scotland.
(TIOS) including discipline groups, University of Twente, The Netherlands.
Concurrent and Logic Programming, Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol, UK.
Distributed Systems Department, University of Ulm, Germany.
Parallel Applications Centre, University of Southampton, UK.
Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Architecture Laboratory (PEDAL), University of Reading, UK.
MEIJE research team, INRIA and the Ecole des Mines de Paris. Investigates concurrency, synchronisation and reactivity.
Distributed Software Engineering, Imperial College, London, UK. See also LTSA tool.

Tools, process algebras, etc.

Concurrency tools:

CWB (Edinburgh Concurrency Workbench) automated toolset. See also the Concurrency Factory and CWB-NC (The Concurrency Workbench of North Carolina), which includes a LOTOS interface, diagnostic infomation, etc. Note: The CWB and CWB-NC have a common ancestor, but are each under separate development.
Concurrency Factory, a "next generation" Concurrency Workbench toolkit.
Circal (CIRcuit CALculus) System supporting a process algebra which may be used to rigorously describe, verify and simulate concurrent systems. See software.
DI2PN tool. Delay Insensitive circuits and Petri Nets. See also here.
FDR2 (Failures-Divergence Refinement) for CSP.
LTSA (Labelled Transition System Analyser), a verification tool for concurrent systems. See also associated Concurrency: State Models & Java Programs book by Jeff Magee and Jeff Kramer (published by Wiley, 1999).
Meije tools for the verification of concurrent programs. It contains: ATG, an X-based editor for labelled automata and networks of synchronized automata; Mauto, a tool for computing transition systems from programs in CCS, Basic Lotos, Meije, or Esterel, reducing them along various bisimulations; Hoggar, a batch tool for fast reduction (for strong, weak, and branching bisimulations) of systems described in FC2 format, using either BDDs or explicit representations.
VERSA - Verification Execution and Rewrite System for ACSR.

Process algebras:

Algebra of Communicating Shared Resources (ACSR) based on CCS from the Real-Time Systems Group , University of Pennsylvania, USA.
CCS (Calculus of Communicating Systems).
CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes). See also FDR tool.
�CRL (micro CRL), process algebraic language for communicating processes with data.
Pi-calculus, a calculus for mobile processes. See also papers by Robin Milner et al. the Mobility Workbench (see README file) and a BibTeX bibliography.

Development methods:

BSP Model (Bulk Synchronous Parallel Computing) and the BSP Library. An approach to portable and predictably-efficient parallel computing by Oxford Parallel.
`pobl', a development method for concurrent (object based) programs.
UNITY, a programming notation and a logic to reason about parallel and distributed programs.
Venari Project at CMU is investigating concurrent and distributed systems agongst other things.
and Formal Methods for Software Engineering and Concurrency projects by Edgar Knapp.
ESPRIT APPARC project (Performance Critical Applications of Parallel Architectures).

Journals

Computer Systems Science and Engineering, Butterworths.
Concurrency: Practice and Experience, Wiley.
Distributed Computing, Springer-Verlag.
Journal of Systems and Software, Elsevier.
Parallel News, Daresbury Laboratory.
The Computer Journal
Transputer Communications, Wiley.

Last updated by Jonathan Bowen, 8 January 2004.
Further information for possible inclusion is welcome.