292 ('~mfercme Report~

facditate the process of managing an organization's relating to time standards, reporting formats, in- computer capacity needs. Such issues as staffing, formation provided, real time display, timelines, cl-ange philosophy, vendor relations and top and manp:)wer requirements must be considered management support of the planning function were when developing the management/measurement reviewed, strategy. He discussed these concerns, proposed a

supportive strategy, and presented actual results in his presentation.

12. Vendor technical presentations J.P. Bu=en et aL (BGS Systems Incorporated) introduced CRYSTAL TM a new tool for the capac-

W.M. Conner (Duquesne Systems Incorporated) ity planner. CRYSTAL TM is a software package d~monstrated deficiencies in the I /O ot~eration that can be used to evaluate the performance of counts maintained by SMF and RMF by compar- new applications while they are being designed ing such counts with the St0 counts maintained by and developed so that system performance can be the MVS version of QCM. Duquesne Systems' considered long before actual programming has event-driven software performance moaitor. The been completed. In combines powerful perfor- implicatioits of these deficiencies were discussed mance modeling capabilities with software en- and unique measures involving the QCM SI0 gineering and structured design techniques. In the count~ were presented in the lecture "An Analysis last leclure ,:)f the conference, Buzen and his col- of I /O Operation C,mnts in MVS". leagues pres~:nted an overview of facilities, model-

According to S.L Sensahaugh (Tesdata Systems ing method~)logy, and guidelines for estimating Corporation), one of the greatest challenges I'acing resource re~:uirem~.ats. the computer management and hence, measure- ment profession, is that of addressing muir;site or A Record of t~.~e Third Annual International very large single site data centers. Some installa- Conference on Computer Capacity Manage- tions have addressed it, others are in a transition ment (ICCCM ~31) has been edited by H.L. ,,rage. and an even larger group is preparing to Bording and is available from the Institute for begin the "di.qribution" of their computer re- Software Engineering, 535 Middlefi~id Road, ~ources. In hi.~ lecture. "'Centrahzed Distributed Suit~ 200, Menlo Park, CA 94025, U.S.A. Price: M,a.,t,remt~nt". he claimed that ~arious problems US $110. 286 pages.

19: 1 International Computing Symposium on Systems Architecture

The 1981 International Computing ,Sym- change of ideas among scientists, computer pOSiUT,, the sixth in a biennial series organized professionals, engineers and managers of oy the European Chapters of the Association problems, new techniques and trends of Sys- for CqJmputing Machinery (ACM), was held at tems Architecture. Topics under discussion at the Institute of Education in London, 30 March the conference included the significant devel-

1 Alrrd, 1981. Altho,J~,...~ theme chosen for opments in computing ranging from theoreti- iCS 81 was Systems A:chitecture, the program cal to very practical aspects. roflec-gd a wide range of topics and contribu- The number of session chahmen, invited .~ons :hat are of current interest and concern speakers and authors, comprised a total of 71. '~o co~n~.uting professionals. The symposium Sixty lectures were presented to give a bal- was f~;t to be successful in its goals to report anced and authoritative view of the significant on the state of the art and to foster the ex- developments in this rapidly expanding area.

Conference Reports 293

ICS 81 was divided into the followin 9 13 whereby a microprogrammable machine is pro- sessions: vided as a node in a Cambridge Ring local area

(1) Distributed and Open Architecture, network, by loading the writeable control store via (2) Microprocessors and Microprogram- the ring the function of this node may be modified

ruing, to suit a particular computation. (3) Communication, An illustration of concepts and mechanisms in (4) System Specification and Requirements, an educational environment was given by J.M. (5) Tools and Management, Bacon and A.V. Stokes (The Hatfield Polytechnic, (6) Data Base Architecture, England) in an address entitled "A Distributed (7) Fault-Tolerant Systems. System for Educational Use". (8) Analysis and Construction of Large Sys- "A Strategy, Method and Set of Tools for a

terns, User Dynamic Microprogramming Environment" (9) Man.Machine Interface, were carefully outlined by P.F. Wilk and G.M. (10) Software and Systems Architecture, Bull ~The Hatfield Polytechnic, England), who in- ( l l )Language Design, tended to create a microprogrammed emulation, (12) Data Flow Architecture, while simultaneously improving computer perfor- (13) Information an,:l System Management. mance significantly. Their proposed micropro-

In addition, the eecond day of the conference gramming environment arose out of extending the was extended to include a paqel discussion on application domain of microprogramming by at- "Formal Specification for Practical Use" and a tempting to design and implement high-level target special-interest tutori,~l was given by T. Glib on machines in microcode. "'Design by Objectives".

Featured below is a rel:>ort with emphasis on topics of special relevance to this Journal. 3. C~mmunication session

D.W. Davies (National Physical Labc, ratory, I. Distributed and open architecture .session England), one of the Invited Speakers at ICS 81.

in a lecture entitled "Teletex with Encrypiion and In a lecture, entitle,] "Multiprocessor Design Signature Facilities", described the main features

and Mathematical Strt~cturvs". 14: Fcrster (The University. Southampton, England) discussed vari- o; Teletex. a message communication service to be ous mathematical structures and showed how they provided by PITs.

One method of "Connecting a Computer to a can be matched to muitiprocessor structures. Packet Switched Network by means of a Finite

M. Banfure (INRIA, France) proposed a new State Automation" was described in detail by P. 14/. computing system (ENCHERE) for automating Garratt (University of Leeds, England). auction sales of Britany fresh fc~od products which "lnternetworking Analysis" was the title of a enables each buyer to have an equal chance (with lecture presented by A. Faro and G. Me~sina (Uni- respect to the other buyers) to bid on the stocks versith di Catania, Italy), in which the'., analyz,.'d from the salesmen, the problems of internetworking by discussing ]-oth

R. Popescu-Zeletin, L. Henckel. W. Heinze, K. protocol and interface aspects in datagram aitd

Jacobsen and G. Maiss(Hahn-Meitner-institut far virtual call environments for obtaining reli'ble Kernforschung, German:,,) in an address entitled and correct interconnections. "'Network Data Management for Heterogeneous Loosely coupled multi-computer systems in- Computer Networks: The Virtual File Concept", volve new problems in the design of interpro,:~'zs leviewed possible system architectures for data communication mechanisms, according to F. F,~r access and transfer in computer netv, orks. (Siemens AG, F.R.G.). These mechanisms :ire

based on the assumption that there is no sh"r,'d 2. Microprocessors and microprogran~ming session main memory. A mechanism which satisfied d-is

aspect was discussed by Eser in the lecture. " (on- fi.P. Bird (University of Kent at Canterbury, cept of a Communication Mechanism with Re-

England) described work, currently in progress, spect to a Distributed Multi-Microcomputer Sys- tem".

2q4 Conference Reports

4. System specification and requirements session sity of Karlsruhe, F,R.G.) presented "'A Method for Interactive Conceptual Database Design",

W.M. Turski (Warsaw University, Poland), which relieves the designer of routine, tedious and another Invited Speaker at ICS 81, introduced the lengthy tasks and enables h im/her to concentrate notion of the stability of software and discussed its on tho:,e design decisions which are out of algo- usefulness for a general assessment of the time- rithmi: control. development of software systems.

In the lecture, "An Activation Model for lnfor- mauon System Specification", R.E. Cooley 6. Datatmsearehitecturesession

(University of Kent at Canterbury, England) pre- "'A Multi-Path Methodolo~' for Developing sented an information system specification law Database Application Systems" was presented by guage which uses an abstract model of an imple- an lnvi ed Speaker, lt.H. Wedekind (University of mentation, called an activation model. Erlangea-Ntirnberg, FR.G.), a system which

Ph. Jorrand (Laboratoire IMAG, France) pro- starts f~ om the requiremc,lt definition phase and sented under the title, "Bases for the Specification proceed, to the formation of concepts until com- 6f Communicating Processes", a unified set of plete d,~ta neutrality is reached in the conceptual tools specifying the communication behavior of a schema process or of a network of processes, for analyzing N.G. -*'oan and G. Sergeant (Laboratoire IMAG, the possibilities of deadlocks and livelocks and for France) described the architecture of the MI- proving the correctness of an implementation of a CROBF distributed database management system, process in terms of a network of more elementary with pat titular emphasis on the distributed execu- processes, tion of tt~e user-requests which are controlled in a

In a lecture entitled "'Interactive Software De- fully detentralized manner by a distributed execu- velopm,mt by Stepwise Formalization", B. KrtJmer tioa mol~itor, called SER. and H.W. Schmidt (Institut for Software- In a lecture entitled "The Architecture of Technologic. F.R.G.) proposed a model of predi- VIDEP,,~.S, A Relational Database Management cute-action nets which combines notions and re- System. H.M. Blanken (Twente University of suits of General Net Theory with design concepts Techncl,~gy, The Netherlands) described the archi- of the system implementation language CDL2. tecture of a database system based on two differ-

ent memory techniques. One memory is fast and 5. l"ooh and management .session intelligenL the 6thor large, inexpensise and possi-

bly non-erasable. According to Bianken, the Some ways in which software engiqcering on- powerfL~ instruction set of the first memory pro-

viroaments aid the development of large software vides good facilities for concurrent access and system.,, such as operating systems, were presented recovery. He claimed that a preliminary perfor- bv H-L. Hausen and M. Miillerburg (lp.stitut for mance aqatysis shows some promising results. Software Technology, F.R.G.) in their lecture, CI. Johnston and A.S. Stone(Aberdeen Univt'r- "'~rchitecture of Software Systems in the Context sity Computing Centre, Scotland) gave a full d,:- of Software Engineering Environments". scription of the development of monitoring tools

7-,,',,. Mu'zner (Technischc Universit~it Mtinchen, for a COD~SYL database management system. F.R.G I and G.R. Kofer ¢Siemens. F.R.G.) pro- R.A. Frost (University of Strathclyde, Scotland) ~cnted a programming s~stem and its language described ASDAS, a database management system which Mlow the description of certain computa- which provides the naive user with facilities for tions as well as interactive data entry in a fully implementing computerized "filing" systems with declarative manne~', minimal programming.

A oroposition was made by R. Valett.~; J. Golzn-

s/,z and M. Court'oisier (CNRS, France) to specif~ 7 Fault-tolerant systems session ~3nchronization methods by means of Petri nets.

tht.s allowing a complete validation before imple- A. Reuter (Technical University of Darmstadt, meatation. F.R.G.) investigated the properties a "Recovery

~I. Gunther; R. Krieger and G. Lausen (Univer- Architecture for Database Systems" should haw,

Conference Reports 295

in order to describe the problems of implementing scribed a complete phototypesetting system re- a recovery component supporting the transaction cently developed for use with text in the Chinese paradigm conveniently, and English languages and now in use for book

BFS--Basic Fault-Tolerant-System, which is the printing in Beijing and Shanghai, implementation of a fault-tolerant multimicrocom- Based on a process-oriented approach to the purer system, was fully described by D. Bernhardt design of interactive systems, R. Nagler (Technical and E. Schmitter (Siemens AG, F.R.G.). University Vienna, Austria) presented a modular

building-block system which enables inexperi- enced programmers also to develop user-friendly

~I. Analysis and construction of large systems sos- and reliable interactive systems for many different sion applications in a short time.

L Somerville (University of Strathclyde, Scot- The invited lecture, "An Empirical Approach to land) described in the lecture, "Providing the User

Program Analysis and Construction", described P. with a Tailor-Made Interface", a system for gener- Naur's (University of Copenhagen, Denmark) work ating aser interfaces to computing systemg and an on establishing detailed information about the associated architecture which can support many realities of the program construction process and different interfaces running simultaneously. of the characteristics of applications programs via in their lecture, "A Man-Machine Communica- studies that pay attention to the minute details of tion Oriented Graphical System", C. Chic~,ix, J. sole:ted particular cases. Dewiue and M. Ollivier (IRISA- INSA, F:ance)

In the speech entitled "The Environment of proposed a solution to the problem of the high Program Development and Maintenance-- cost of graphic representative systems by ~!esigning Programs, Programming and Programming Sup- a graphic~,l interactive development tool. port", M . M Lehman (Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, England), another Invited Speaker at ICS 81, discussed the status 10. Software and systems arehitectvre session and potenual of Program Support Environments (PSEs) and the possible role of representational R.N. lbbett (lJniversity of Manchest~.r, Eng- and executable models in both verification and land) exa~liaed mechanisms which have been used validation activities, in a nanber of computers and showed how the

C Flovd (Technical University of Berlin, search fo higher performance in machines such as F.P,.G.) proposed "A Process-Oriented Approach the CDC 6600 and 7600 led inevitably to the use to Software Development" out of the conviction cf 'Vectcr Processing' in the CRAY-I. The ideas that changing requirements, in particular evolving behind the provision of vector facilities in ma- handling requirements, and the feasibility of sys- chines sl:ch as MU5 and the CDC STAR-100 were tematic user guidance are crucial for determining discussed, and the characteristics of a proposed the practical relevance of methods and tools for system involving a multiplicity of vector units were software production, examineJ.

"The Dynamic Macro Pipeline" (DMP), an al- ternativ,; approach to Macro Parallelism for some

9. Man.machine interface session specific applications, was described by D.J. How- arth and A.A.R. Nazif (Imperial College of Sci-

In an invited speech, entitled "New Technology once, London, England). DMP regards the proce- and its Influence on the User", W. Newman (Logica dures ;rod functions of an aFplication program VTS Limited, England) discussed technological in- with structure as units of decomposition. It pro- novation in the context of interactive systems ~,nd vides ~ dynamic binding between these units and their users, tile Data Stream Memory modules, and allows

B.R. Gaines (Monotype-China Limited, Hung increased concurrency by queuing the DSM's ~o Kong and G.W. Information Transfer Systems their required units. It therefore overlaps the Limited, U.K.), in his lecture, "Some Experience processing of a given data stream with those of in Text Processing in the Chinese Language", de- others, thus increasing the throughput.

=96 Conferem'e Reports

J.P. Elloy, CI. Mumh (ENSM, France) and has been developed to enable structured applica- J.Ph. Stefanini (CROUZET, France~ described a tion software to be written for a distributed multi- design study into computer structures which were pie microproce, sor system. to support critical control functions in process "Building a Uniform Programming Environ- plants, ment based on Data Abstraction". This was the

in a lecture presented by M. Gourand, M. subject of a lecture presented by ILT. Boute (Bell Schneider and A. Tanguy (Universit6 Clermont, Telephone Mfg. Cy., Belgium), in which such an France~ a systematic method to evaluate the per- environment was described. formances of a system was suggested based on a D.L. Scapin (INRIA, France), in a lecture enti- computer tool to obtain an analytical model of a tied "Evaluation of an Electronic Mail Language", stocha,,;tic system. They showed in a particular reported the results of an experiment on the un- ease that an analytical model obtained systemati- derstandability of a command language of an elec- cally via an appropriate computer tool can give the tronic mail system. The results indicated that both re.+ults habitually obtained by a discrete simula- computer language experience and level of infor- tion. The methodology suggested appears more mation about the system affected the performance. flexible than simulation, according to the authors. in the sense that readjustments both in the coa- stru~tion of the model and in the resolution of tile 12, Data flow architecture session mfalel can be made very quickly.

A.J. Catto, J.R. Gurd and C.C. Kirkham IThe Uaiversity, Manchester, U.K.) described recent te-

l l . Language design session search on "Nondeternunistic Eataflow Prog~ram- ruing" which has progressed cor~currently with the

V.A. Downes (Imperial College, Englaud) ex- design and construction of a prototype dataflow ammed in the Invited Lecture, entitled "Software computer at Manchester University. The work Construction with the Aria Programming Lan- demonstrates the feasibility of using h2gl',-level guage", the extent to ~hich the new programming nondeterministic programmi.ng languages to ira- language Ada provides a sound vehicle for the plement general applications on dataflow hard- support of good programming practice both for ware. tt'e devel,~pment of complete systems and for the A strateg?/ for deriving Data Flow architecture c,,nst-uction of software component libraries, was introduced by P.E. Osmon (Westfield College,

In a lectuee entitled "'CHILL Based Distributed U.K.) in a lecture entitled "Hierarchical Language Architecture", R. De Nicola R. Martucci and P. Derived Data Flow Architectures". The strategy is R,~bertt (ITALTEL Socict~ Italiana Telecomun- to iterate around a loop comprising programming icazicnl s.p.a. Italy~ presented linguistic tools and problems, language facilities, and models of com- a prt, g-amming environment that will permit the putation. manag,:ment of large pieces of software in distrib- In the lecture, "On Using Data Flow in a uted eovuonment~. System of Multiple Single Board Computers", J.

The KIWINET./NICOLA project is attempting Aspelund (Helsinki University of Technology, Fin- t,~ de,,:lop a universal user friendly Operating land) discussed the simulation of data flow in a Sv.~tcm Command and Response Language. K. Ere symmetric system of standa-d microcomputer and K. ttopper (University of Leed.,, England) modules. described in their lecture, "The KIWINET/ F. 14,'. Burton and M.R. Sleep (Universit) of East NICOLA Approach: Matching OS Responses to Anglia, U.K.), in their lecture entitled "'Communi- Users", the automatic gerteration ol responses cation in a Distributed Implementation of an Ap- ~vhich are tailored to individual user s~ mantic do- plicative Language", showed that there is consider- tnairts, able potential for parallelism in suitable applica-

R.L. Gronsdale. F. Halsall, F. Partm-Polo and tire programs and 6iscossed a programming tech- (;.C. Shoja (University of Sussex, England) de- nique which may realize this potential. .~=ribed in their lecture the structure and features of the programming la.aguage MARTLET which

Conference Reports 297

13. Information and system management session from the Dictionary management software, was suggested and described by F.S. Sahran (London

In a speech entitled "VME/B Resource Man- School of Economics, U.K.). agement Environment (RME) - - An Integrated In her lecture entitled "How to Structure Un- Approach to Packaging Systems Software", D.G.U. structured Languages", R. Nagel (SOFTLAB Primrose (ICL Dataskil Limited, U.K.) presented GmbH, F.R.G.) presented the main features and a study of a real software requirement, and how implementation of a new 'structure method' which the solution was, and is being, implemented by a was integrated in a widely used, interactive pro- sm',dl team of enlightened systems staff, gram development system (PET/X 1150/

In the lecture "'Some Concepts for an Informa- MAESTRO in U.S.A.). tion Systems Architecture", C. Roiland (Universit~ Paris, i, France) proposed an architecture for an The Proceedings of the Sixth ACM European information system as a tuple (data base, program Regional Conference are available from West- base, event processor) specified by the couple bury House, The Books Division of IPC Sci- (coaceptual schema, abstract machine), ence and Technology Press Limited, P.O. Box,

A "Basic Structure for Data Dictionary Sys- Bury Street, Gui[dford, Surrey GU2 5BH, Eng- terns', which separates the Dictionary data base land. Price: £20; ISBN: 086103.