Subject: REFEREE'S REPORT From: AJ KleinOsowski Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2001 10:39:49 -0600 (CST) To: gcf@indiana.edu CC: Professor Lilja Greetings-- Below is my review for your journal. -AJ -- AJ KleinOsowski (ajko@ece.umn.edu) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Minnesota - Twin Cities CandC:PandE Referee Report Form *********************************************** Electronic Transmission to gcf@indiana.edu strongly preferred Referees Home Page: http://aspen.ucs.indiana.edu/CandCPandE/ Email gcf@indiana.edu for URL of full paper to be reviewed WILEY Journal Home Page John Wiley and Sons, Ltd. Baffins Lane, Chichester West Sussex, PO19 1UD, England Telephone: (01243) 779777 Fax: (01243) 770379 REFEREE'S REPORT Concurrency and Computation:Practice and Experience ********** A: General Information Please return to: Geoffrey C. Fox Electronically Preferred gcf@indiana.edu Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience Computer Science Department 228 Lindley Hall Bloomington Indiana 47405 Office Phone 8128567977(Lab), 8128553788(CS) but best is cell phone 3152546387 FAX 8128567972 Please fill in Summary Conclusions (Sec. C) and details as appropriate in Secs. D, E and F. B: Refereeing Philosophy We encourage a broad range of readers and contributors. Please judge papers on their technical merit and separate comments on this from those on style and approach. Keep in mind the strong practical orientation that we are trying to give the journal. Note that the forms attached provide separate paper for comments that you wish only the editor to see and those that both the editor and author receive. Your identity will of course not be revealed to the author. C: Paper and Referee Metadata Paper Number Cnnn: C577 Date: November 20, 2001 Paper Title: A comparison of concurrent programming and cooperative multithreading Author(s): Aaron W. Keen, Takashi Ishihara, Justin t. Maris, Tiejun Li, Eugene F. Fodor, and Ronald A. Olsson Referee: AJ KleinOsowski (by way of David J. Lilja) Address: University of Minnesota 200 Union Street SE Minneapolis, MN 55455 Referee Recommendations. Please indicate overall recommendations here, and details in following sections. X publish as is accepted provided changes suggested are made reject D: Referee Comments (For Editor Only) -none- E: Referee Comments (For Author and Editor) The paper presents a detailed analysis of various concurrent programming models. In particular, the authors modeled and evaluated the runtime efficiency and code complexity of a cooperative multithreading paradigm and a concurrent programming paradigm using modified versions of the SR programming language using toy benchmarks running on linuxPC systems. The authors were especially thorough in their analysis by introducing context switching modeling into their concurrent programming model. This added accommodation (context switching) made the comparison between the two models (concurrent programming versus cooperative multithreading) especially realistic. Overall, this paper was excellent. The modeling methodology is sound and the results are thoroughly analyzed. Readers who work with grid computing or other large-scale parallel systems can use this paper to assist them in determining which approach (concurrent programming or cooperative multithreading) is the best approach for their parallel programming needs. My only concern about this paper is that the authors should add a sentence or two somewhere around the third paragraph of section 1 to better distinguish their definition of multithreading from the multithreading currently coming out in commercial processors (IBM Power 4, Alpha 21464, Intel Xeons). These new processors execute multiple threads concurrently, not one at a time, as the authors' definition of multithreading assumes. F: Presentation Changes I suggest using numbers, rather than Roman numerals, to refer to tables. Numbers tend to be less confusing, especially to readers who are skimming the paper. Table XI -> Table 11 -- : : Geoffrey Fox gcf@indiana.edu FAX 8128567972 : Phones Cell 315-254-6387 Home 8123239196 Lab 8128567977 CS 8128553788