IEEE Software magazine has announced a December 31 deadline for the third annual Gordon Bell Prize for outstanding achievements in the application of parallel processing to scientific and engineering problems.
The prize is sponsored by Gordon Bell, vice president of engineering at Ardent Computer Systems; the judging is administered by IEEE Software, which is published by the IEEE Computer Society, the international professional organization of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Two $1000 prizes will be awarded to the two best entries of three categories. In the performance category, the submitted program must run faster than any other comparable engineering or scientific application. Judges will consider the megaflop rate based on actual operation counts or the solution of the same problem with properly tuned code on a machine of known performance as suitable evidence.
In the price/performance category, the entrant must show that the application divided by the cost of the system is better than any other entry. Performance measurement is the same for the performance category. Price will be the list price of the computational engine (CPUs, including adequate memory to run the program). Peripherals and software need not be included in the price. Entrants must submit the output from a Linpack 100 x 100 benchmark showing a speedup of at least 5 megaflops.
The compiler parallelization category is for the compiler/application that generates the most speedup, which will be measured by the execution time without automatic parallelization divided by the execution with automatic parallelization. A third run that uses compiler directives to improve parallelization may also be submitted. For entry information, contact:
1989 Gordon Bell Prize c/o IEEE Software 10662 Los Vaqueros Cir. Los Alamitos, CA 90720-2578
TurboPower has released Object Professional 1.0, a library of object-oriented routines that enhances the productivity of OOP in Turbo Pascal 5.5 by providing more than 30 high-level object types with more than 1000 methods and routines in the categories of user-interface design, data manipulation, and low-level system access. Object Professional takes advantage of all of Turbo Pascal 5.5's advanced object-oriented features, including constructors, destructors, and static methods.
Object Professional allows interfaces ranging from text-mode Presentation Manager look-alikes, to Lotus-style menu bars, to your own look and feel design. The window object is the root of the hierarchy, and supports overlapping, resizeable text windows with support for scroll bars, and other mouse operations. Additional object types inherit the window's functionality, and offer data entry fields, full-screen forms, pull-down and horizontal-bar menu systems, pick lists, file selection boxes, and more. Generalized capabilities for stacks, linked lists, and virtual arrays are also offered.
Object Professional's system-oriented routines provide capabilities like TSR management, interrupt service routines, EMS and extended memory management, enhanced keyboard support, BCD arithmetic, and others. The TSR manager is new, and swaps to disk or EMS, squeezing complex pop-up programs into as little as 5K of normal RAM space. Although we haven't had a chance to fiddle with Object Professional yet, TurboPower has a reputation for good products, good prices, and good people. We'll be reviewing Object Professional before long to see if this trend continues with this latest product.
Object Professional 1.0 is based on the Turbo Professional 5.0 toolkit, which TurboPower will continue to sell and support, and which compiles and runs without modification under Turbo Pascal 5.5. Object Professional sells for $150, and includes complete source code, documentation, and a royalty-free license to develop commercial applications.
TurboPower Software P.O. Box 66747 Scotts Valley, CA 95066-0747 408-438-8608
Quarterdeck Office System has announced QRAM, a tool for organizing and allocating memory resources for 8088/86-based PCs and AT-style 286 PCs. QRAM gives XT- and AT-class PCs with EMS 4.0 or EEMS memory the capacity to load programs into high memory (between 640K and 1024K), previously unavailable to DOS. The ability to load LAN drivers, TSRs, and mouse drivers into high memory allows conventional DOS memory to be used by applications. QRAM is the only product available that adds load-high capability on top of any EMS 4.0 or EEMS driver. It costs $59.95. Reader service no. 21.
Quarterdeck Office Systems 150 Pico Blvd. Santa Monica, CA 90405 213-392-9851
A set of productivity tools for Turbo C and Turbo Pascal programmers has been released by Mostly Mice Software Inc. The menuing and mouse driver tools, which are patches to the Turbo programming environment, make all Turbo C 2.0 and Turbo Pascal 5.5 commands and functions available through pull-down menus. Programmers can then point-and-shoot at commands, then drop them into a program.
Additionally, the tools allow you to highlight blocks of text from within an Edit window by dragging the mouse, to switch between Edit and Watch windows by pointing-and-shooting, and to work in either 25 or 43/50 line mode. The drivers work within DESQview and can be used with all Microsoft-compatible mice.
The Turbo drivers, like other Mostly Mice products (menuing and mouse drivers for Lotus, Wordstar, WordPerfect, etc.), are developed by independent programmers around the country who work on a royalty basis with Mostly Mice. Company president Simeon Berman told DDJ, "I'm interested in evaluating other people's work for our family of products, not just mouse drivers."
The Turbo C and Turbo Pascal Menuing and Mouse Drivers (both include a KEY.COM keyboard analyzer) sell for $29.95 each. Reader service no. 22.
Mostly Mice Software, Inc. 125 Gates Ave. Montclair, NJ 07042 201-746-9256 for technical information 800-283-4080 for orders
Digitalk Inc. is now shipping Smalltalk/V PM, the first programming environment for OS/2 Presentation Manager. An object-oriented environment that is fully integrated with PM, Smalltalk/V PM can be used to prototype and deliver user-interface intensive applications, such as database front ends, CASE tools, and financial models.
Jim Anderson, president of Digitalk, claims that the technology behind this product "prevents PM from becoming a massive knot of complications."
The first and only fully compiled Smalltalk, this product gives developers a responsive environment and access to PM features. Smalltalk/V PM allows the programmer to take advantage of the unique benefits of PM without sacrificing performance.
The source code is compatible with Smalltalk/V 286 and Smalltalk/V Mac products, which allows portability of applications between different environments. The developer can use browsers to navigate through code and explore PM. Digitalk claims that the system is crash proof, which encourages an experimental style of programming. It sells for $499.95, and includes a user manual and tutorial for learning object-oriented programming. Jeff Duntemann plans on looking further into this product in his December 1989 "Structured Programming" column. Reader service no. 23.
Digitalk Inc. 9841 Airport Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90045 213-645-1082
The MasPar Computer Corporation's family of computers has, in addition to the standard Unix environment, a graphical, interactive programming environment called the MasPar Programming Environment (MPPE). A versatile set of tools that enables users to apply data parallel programming algorithm techniques to large numbers of processors, the MPPE helps overcome design barriers that hamper application development in other multiple processor systems. The MPPE is designed to operate over network-based systems using the X-Window system protocol layer, and permits programmers to develop and debug applications using the windowing capability of a workstation.
The key tool is an "on-demand" source-level debugger. Others include browsers, animators, and visualizers, and are accessed by a graphical user interface. Designed for programming, adaptation, and debugging of computationally-intensive applications, these tools supposedly bring a new level of programmer productivity to high-end computing.
The MPPE provides program development, check-out, debug, and animation facilities that are geared to the task of data parallel programming. An integrated editor, data display facility, and symbolic debugger allow a programmer to move freely between execution, check out, what-if analysis, and code modification. A browse capability immediately answers questions such as "where is this subroutine called?" and "where is this block COMMON referenced?"
With the MPPE a programmer can see how code actually executes in a variety of situations, including hardware utilization for optimization and tuning, and aggregation of individual data cells into high-level abstractions. MPPE is available for all MasPar-supported languages. Reader service no. 34.
MasPar Computer Corporation 749 North Mary Avenue Sunnyvale, CA 94086 408-736-3300
The Whitewater Group has released the Whitewater Resource Toolkit for Microsoft Windows, which allows programmers to manage a Windows application's look and feel, and to create Windows resources such as dialog boxes, bitmaps, cursors, icons, and pull-down menus. Programmers can also create keyboard accelerators and string resources.
According to Whitewater's Hope Gillespie, "One of the major difficulties facing the Windows programmer using conventional tools is the time-consuming edit-compile-link development cycle. The Whitewater Resource Toolkit's interactivity allows programmers to immediately see the results of their programming from within Windows, greatly increasing their productivity."
The toolkit is a stand-alone application that complements, but does not require, the Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) and its resource compiler (RC). It is compatible with all Windows resource file formats, and can generate RC-compatible script and bitmap files. It has bitmap, cursor, icon, menu, dialog, string table, and accelerator tables editors.
Completely written in Actor, the toolkit is geared toward C programmers, Microsoft SDK users, and Actor programmers. It requires Microsoft Windows and will run on the IBM PC/AT, PS/2, and compatibles with 1 Mbyte of RAM, a hard disk, graphics display of EGA or better and adapter, mouse, and DOS 2.0 or higher. It includes full support for the Lotus/Intel/Microsoft Expanded Memory Specification EMS 3.2, and sells for $195.
At the same time, The Whitewater Group announced WinTrieve, a Microsoft windows-based file indexed manager, which is a comprehensive set of tools for building custom data management procedures into Microsoft Windows applications. Zack Urlocker, manager of developer relations, claims it "allows programmers to create Windows applications that access database information faster and with less programming than ever before."
WinTrieve has an ISAM (indexed sequential access method) server, a C application programming interface (API) library, and an Actor class library. The ISAM server provides a method for storing and retrieving data based on indexes, and includes random and sequential access, concurrent multiple file access, automatic updating of indexes, file and record level locking, multiple indexes, journaling across multiple files, and transaction commit and rollback.
The C API library has C functions that can access the ISAM server, and effectively hides the ISAM server while minimizing responsibility for session initiation and termination.
WinTrieve requires Microsoft Windows and the IBM XT, AT, PS/2, and compatibles, a hard disk, graphics display and adapter, and DOS 2.0 or higher. It uses 90K of memory running as a separate application, and includes full support for the Lotus/Intel/Microsoft Expanded Memory Specification EMS 3.2. When used with C, it requires 640K, and with Actor, 1 Mbyte of RAM. It sells for $395. Reader service no. 24.
The Whitewater Group 600 Davis St. Evanston, IL 60201 312-328-3800 800-869-1144
Oasys Inc. has announced a Green Hills C++ compiler which, claims the company, is the only C++ compiler that supports cross- and native-mode development. The compiler supports K&R C and is ANSI C compliant.
In addition to providing OOP features such as data abstraction, type checking, and overloading of function names and operators, the Green Hills C++ compiler also provides classes with scope, and overloading new and arrow operators. Green Hills has also built its standard optimizing techniques, such as inlining, loop unrolling, and register caching, into the compiler.
Initially, the system will run on Sun-3 systems, though Oasys says that it will be ported to UNIX workstation and minicomputer platforms in the near future. Reader service no. 25.
Oasys Inc. 230 Second Ave. Waltham, MA 02154 617-890-7889
Copyright © 1989, Dr. Dobb's Journal