Dear Colleague,


We intend to submit a proposal to NSF in the Information Technology
Research Program, in time for the February 14, 2000 deadline.

The proposed project will research dynamic, object-oriented frameworks for
message-based parallel computing.  Guided initially by the successful
MPI (Message Passing Interface) standard for parallel programming in C
and Fortran, we will devise and investigate APIs for parallel computing
in the context of modern network programming languages.  The project
will build on work on object-oriented bindings for MPI-like systems,
carried out by members of the Java Grande Forum.  An important
focus will be exploitation of technologies similar to those developed
in Sun's Jini project.  These ideas promote federatiton of resources
within the LAN or Internet.  We anticipate that they will also
facilitate construction of scalable and fault-tolerant platforms for
parallel computing, from spontaneously discovered computational resources.
Jini-like technology can add new job initiation capabilities, beyond
those found in traditional high-performance computing environments.

An early deliverable will be a robust pure-Java implementation of the
message-passing API, MPJ, specified by the Java Grande Message-Passing
Working Group.  This implementation will internally adopt Jini protocols
and software components to manage distributed resources and detect
failures, while providing a traditional SPMD programming environment at
the user level.  Later research will investigate how to bring low-level
techniques for dealing with partial failures into the realm of control
of the high-level parallel programmer.  An overall research goal is
to combine successful technologies for High Performance computing with
state-of-the-art object-oriented technologies for network programming.

The budget will fall into the "not exceeding $500K" category.
The participating institutions may include Syracuse University and Florida
State University.  The PIs will be one or both of us:


Dr David Bryan Carpenter,
Dr Geoffrey C Fox.


_________________________________________________________________________

NPAC, 111 College Place       FAX  : (315) 443-1973
Syracuse University           Email: dbc@npac.syr.edu
Syracuse, NY 13244-4100       URL  : http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/dbc/