This project was sponsored by Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DoD) ARPA Order No. 3803, monitored by Naval Electronic System Command under Contractor No. N00034-R-0251. It was also sponsored by Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DoD) ARPA Order No. 4871, monitored by Naval Electronic Systems Command under Contract No. N00039-84- C-0089.

Parallel architectures are no longer pure research vehicles, as they were some years ago. There are now many commercial systems competing for market segments in scientific computing. The 1990s are likely to become the decade of parallel processing. CONPAR 90 - VAPP IV is the joint successor meeting of two highly successful international conference series in the field of vector and parallel processing. This volume contains the 79 papers presented at the conference. The various topics of the papers include hardware, software and application issues. Some of the session titles best reflect the contents: new models of computation, logic programming, large-grain data flow, interconnection networks, communication issues, reconfigurable and scalable systems, novel architectures and languages, high performance systems and accelerators, performance prediction / analysis / measurement, performance monitoring and debugging, compile-time analysis and restructurers, load balancing, process partitioning and concurrency control, visualization and runtime analysis, parallel linear algebra, architectures for image processing, efficient use of vector computers, transputer tools and applications, array processors, algorithmic studies for hypercube-type systems, systolic arrays and algorithms. The volume gives a comprehensive view of the state of the art in a field of current interest.

This book focuses on object-oriented concurrent computing, which can be considered a model of concurrent programming, and proposes a new programming language, ConcurrentSmalltalk, which is based on object-oriented concurrent computing. The book also shows the efficiency of object-oriented concurrent computing through the design, implementation, and evaluation of ConcurrentSmalltalk. ConcurrentSmalltalk is designed to be upwardly compatible with Smalltalk-80. In the book, the ConcurrentSmalltalk object model is first proposed. Next, issues which arise from maintaining compatibility with Smalltalk-80 are discussed. Finally, the ConcurrentSmalltalk virtual machine which executes the ConcurrentSmalltalk programs is proposed.