Future Generation Computer Systems 9 (1993) 3-4 3 North-Holland

Guest editorial

McikUS 92

The MeikUS 92 conference held at Manchester Computing Centre in the UK, was the third in a series of annual conferences with the aim of bringing together both the manufacturers and users of parallel computing systems supplied by Europe 's largest parallel computing vendor, Meiko Ltd. This special issue of Future Genera- tion Computer Systems contains a selection of the contributions presented at the conference which was held in April 1992.

The aim of MeikUS 92 was to attract papers from researchers and developers in a wide range of application areas, to demonstrate the wide- spread use of parallel computers and to identify areas of common interest. For convenience the papers in this issue have been broadly categorised into three areas: scientific applications, commer- cial applications and support tools and systems.

The first three contributions are concerned with scientific applications. The first is a paper by Mitchell and Fincham. They describe the basic strategies for the parallelisation of molecular dy- namic simulation codes. They present a novel hybrid approach to the parallelisation of the fastest known sequential algorithm, the link cell neighbour list. This is followed by a paper by Clare and Stevens which describes the use of parallel computers in the field of oceanographic modelling. They discuss the use of data domain decomposition techniques for the method of fi- nite differences applied to the oceanographic model, and compare their results with sequential implementations of the same model on vector supercomputers including a CRAY X-MP and an Amdahl VP1200. The final paper in this section is by Reale, Barbera and Sciortino and discusses the parallelisation of a two-dimensional hydrodynam- ics code which is used to study a wide variety of

astrophysical flows. In order to abstract the paral- lelisation away from the hardware, they have developed a high-level library of routines which are built upon the CS Tools communications primitives of the underlying Meiko system.

The use of parallel computers for commercial applications is the subject of the next three pa- pers.

Cramb and Winterbottom report on an evalua- tion of a parallel Oracle database platform and discuss cost-performance and implementation is- sues associated with transferring a large commer- cial database system from a sequential to a paral- lel machine. They discuss the hardware and soft- ware environment and conclude with remarks on system scalability with respect to performance and efficiency.

The second paper in this section discusses the use of genetic algorithms for searching database systems in parallel and was submitted by Cui, Fogarty and Gammack. They describe two appli- cations of their search technique. The first is the well-known travelling salesman problem, which is used to illustrate the technique and provides a benchmark for assessing its effectiveness. The second is a credit scoring application and uses a real database provided by a bank. The final paper in this section is by Keane. The paper reports on the parallelisation of a financial system which evaluates the liabilities of a pension scheme by calculating the expected cost of each member in the scheme in the future.

The final section contains two papers which discuss tools and systems to make parallel com- puters easier to use.

The first paper by Grant and Dickens discusses the use of graphical performance monitoring tools as part of the parallel programming process and

0376-5075/93/$06.00 © 1993 - Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. All rights reserved

4 Guest editorial

describes the implementation of a portable com- munications library on the Meiko system. They report that although the interface to a number of portable communications libraries may appear to be very similar, their efficient implementation on a particular architecture depends on the nature of the underlying communications model.

The final paper by Marino, Succi, Levo and Pavesio describes a set of tools which are used to administer the topology of processors used in an application. They describe an X-windows based system which can be used to download processes onto processors and also monitors the communi- cation load on individual links in the network.

The editors are most grateful to the publishers

of Future Generation Computer Systems for pro- viding the opportunity to report on the current developments in parallel computing which were discussed at the conference. They would also like to thank the authors for editing and updating their papers to make them suitable for publica- tion.

Andrew (;rant Manchester Computing Centre

University of Manchester

Peter Dew School of Computer Studies

University of Leeds