
\documentstyle{letter}

\begin{document}

\address {\vspace{0.2in}\\Dr.\ David Bryan Carpenter \\
Northeast Parallel Architectures Center \\
111 College Place \\
Syracuse University \\
Syracuse, NY 13244-4100 \\
Phone: (315) 443-5068 \\
FAX  : (315) 443-1973 \\
email: dbc@npac.syr.edu
}

\begin{letter}{\bf Recommendation for Saleh Elmohamed}

\opening{Dear Colleague,}


I met Saleh Elmohamed three years ago when I joined Northeast Parallel
Architecture Center as a research scientist and project leader.  In the
intervening time I have had frequent contact with Saleh, and had the
pleasure of working with him on many occasions.  While not under my
direct supervision, he has had numerous productive interactions with
my research group---often contributing to group meetings, helping
directly with development of interfaces, installations and
demonstrations of our software, and guiding younger members of the
group in various projects.

The activities of our group are focussed on development of libraries,
compilers, and other system software for parallel computing.  In the
past two years we have emphasized support for parallel and distributed
computing in Java.  Saleh has put together interesting and useful
Java applications and applets, and helped to parallelize them using our
{\em HPJava} software.  These demonstrations have been run on clusters of NT
workstations and on a networks of Sun stations using SunHPC software
for underlying communications.  The demos formed an important part
of presentions by our group at the 1997 and 1998 Supercomputing
conferences in San Jose and Orlando.  The software is now part of our
software repository and will be included in the example suite
of forthcoming {\em mpiJava} releases.

Saleh was also involved in design of the virtual programming lab (VPL)
used as part of the distance education work of NPAC.  This is an environment
that makes parallel processing on our computing systems available to schools
and government organizations.  Remote users exploit VPL to run MPI jobs
(for example) written in C, Fortran or Java.  Saleh extended the
functionality of VPL and made it into a robust and user-friendly
package, which, again, we have used to run HPJava demos at
conferences.

Saleh continues to work with our research group, helping to enhance our
HPJava software and adding useful parallel applications and
demonstrations.  He has also been working on algorithms and heuristics
for physical optimization problems such as resource allocation and
scheduling, and looking at shared memory and message-passing
programming models for parallel and distributed computing in general.

My experience leads me to believe that Saleh would soon become a
highly valued colleague in any organization involved in development of
computer software or hardware, especially for distributed or parallel
systems.  I can highly recommend him for his considerable technical
abilities, his constant enthusiasm, and his professional and personal
good nature.

\closing{Yours sincerely,\\\vspace{0.8in}Bryan Carpenter}

\end{letter}

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