Meeting Minutes

Wednesday, May 1, 1996

Location:

DC 1304

Time:

1:30 PM

Chair:

Navid Sadikali

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1. Adoption of the Agenda - additions or deletions

2. Coffee Hour

Coffee hour this week:

Ed Dengler

Coffee hour next week:

Any volunteers?

3. Next meeting

Date:

May 8, 1996

Location:

DC 1304

Time:

1:30 PM

Chair:

Balasingham Balakumaran

Technical presentation:

Mike McCool

4. Forthcoming

Chairs:

1. Richard Bartels
2. John Beatty
3. Leith Chan

Tech Presenters:

1. Thomas Pflaum
2. Randall Reid
3. Navid Sadikali

5. Technical Presentation

Presenter:

Dan Milgram

Title:

Iris Performer

Abstract:

Iris Performer is a toolkit used primarily for visual simulation, virtual reality, as well as other real-time graphics applications. It's use is intended for high-end graphics workstations which have multiple CPUs. This talk will provide an overview of the various features of Performer and briefly explain how these features can be utlitized.

6. General Discussion Items

Please be reminded that lab meetings from now until August 31 will start at 1:30. Any lab member who has a key is entitled to a lab duty. Please review the list of lab duties and email your request to me by Monday morning. Fabrice and I will review the requests and prepare a new list for next Wednesday's lab meeting. Please direct any questions regarding lab duties to Fabrice or myself. Please also remember that until the new duties are assigned, you still own the lab duty you presently have.

7. Action List

8. Director's Meeting

9. Seminars

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES

MASTER'S ESSAY PRESENTATION

                    -Wednesday, May 1, 1996

Ivan  Yu,  graduate  student,  Dept.  Comp. Sci., Univ.
Waterloo,    will    speak   on   ``Integrating   Event
Visualization and Sequential Debugging''.

TIME:                2:30-3:30 p.m.

ROOM:                DC 1331

ABSTRACT

Understanding  the  behavior  of  a distributed program
involves  understanding  the  interactions  between the
processes.     An   event   visualizer   showing   such
interactions  can  be  a very useful debugging tool for
distributed programs.

Many  distributed  debuggers assume that the programmer
has  a  sequential  debugger to deal with bugs local to
one  process.   There  is,  however,  little  technical
literature covering the interface between a distributed
debugger and a sequential debugger.  In many cases, the
programmer does not know whether a failure is caused by
an  internal  bug  or  an interaction bug.  Thus, it is
useful  to develop an interface between distributed and
sequential   debuggers   so  that  sequential-debugging
facilities   are  available  in  conjunction  with  the
higher-level event visualization.

This  presentation  will  address  the  various  design
issues  and problems that may arise when implementing a
linkage  between  an  event visualizer and a sequential
debugger.


DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO
SEMINAR ACTIVITIES

COMPUTER SCIENCE SEMINAR

                    -Thursday, May 2, 1996

Josyula   Ramachandra   RAO,  IBM  T.J.Watson  Research
Center,  will  speak  on  ``Tools  and  techniques  for
programming distributed systems''.

TIME:                11:00 a.m. - 12:00 noon

ROOM:                DC 1302

ABSTRACT

The  first part of this talk will describe Concert/C, a
language  for programming distributed applications on a
heterogeneous  set  of  machines.  The language extends
ANSI  C  by providing primitives for process management
and  inter-process  communication.   The  design of the
language  has  been  motivated  by  the  twin  goals of
accommodating  legacies  (in code, tools and programmer
skills)  and  accomodating  heterogeneity  (in  machine
architectures,   operating  systems  and  communication
protocols) while hiding complexity from the programmer.
I  will  give an overview of Concert/C and describe the
design and implementation of the compiler and runtime.

The second half of the talk will focus on tools used to
debug distributed applications written using middleware
technologies  such  as  Concert/C. We have prototyped a
distributed  debugger  that  supports  the debugging of
multi--threaded,     multi--process,    multi--language
applications   that   use  multiple  middlewares  while
executing  in  a heterogeneous distributed environment.
We describe the salient and interesting features of the
debugger's architecture and functionality.

The talk will conclude with some introspective comments
and suggestions for future research.



Wednesday, May 8, 1996
Friends of the Library Public Talk
``Exposing Text:  How questions for the Oxford English 
Dictionary (OED) lead to answers for the WWW''
Frank Tompa, Chair, Computer Science, University of Waterloo
12:00 noon; Theatre of the Arts, Modern Language Building

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10. Lab Cleanup (until 1:30 or 5 minutes)