Software Engineering and Neural Networks Applied to Physics and Electricity

SENNAPE - ITDC-143

Keywords: parallel processing, optimisation, image processing, transputers, parallelisation

Start Date: 1 February 95 / Duration: 30 months

Objectivies and Approach

The general objective of this research project is to design an efficient parallel programming environment for assisting the user in writing and evaluating parallel programs, which involves:

enhancing the functionality to FPT (Fortran Parallelising Transformer, a state of the art software provided by the University of Ghent) by creating a graphical programming environment,
porting the code generation of FPT to the Siemens shared memory multiprocessor platform,
using FPT to parallelise real life applications.

The following approaches will be used to fulfill these objectives:

developing a Graphical Programming Environment that can interactively display a procedure call-graph, a data dependence graph, the loop iteration space, a task graph of the source code to expose to user the dependence and partition information of the program,
instrumenting the program to detect its potential parallelism and to analyse and profile the behaviour and performance of the resulting program,
porting FPT to a shared memory multiprocessor and use benchmark programs to test the practical usefulness of the system.

Progress and Results

After a long delay due ot difficulties in the importation process, the TN 310 system has been installed. During the waiting for installation and training, the development group prepared and attended a number of seminars and courses at UFRJ and LNCC (National Laboratory for Scientific Computing). These activities focused on distributed processing techniques and transputers technology. Further understanding on how to run the desired applications on TN 310 system were achieved. Contacts with the research laboratory of the Brazilian electricity company, CEPEL, were reinforced in order to start having some activity on this branch of the project. Close contact with CERN allowed to better discuss the physics part of the project.

Information Dissemination Activities and/or Exploitation

A couple of seminars concerning the project were presented at UFRJ. At artificial intelligence and computing conferences, Sennape has been mentioned as part of the group's present activity. A paper concerning the project was presented at the International IFAC Workshop on Technology Transfer and Control, held in Curitiba, Brazil in 1995.

Coordinator

Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
CP 68504 Rio de Janeiro 21945-970, BRZ

EU Partners

European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), F
Telmat Multinode, F

Non-EU Partners

Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, BRZ
CEPEL, BRZ
Petrobras, BRZ

CONTACT POINT

Mr. Luiz Pereira Caloba
Tel: +55 21 280 73 93
Fax: +55 21 290 66 26
E-mail: caloba@coe.ufrj.br