Programming is hard. Building a large program is like constructing a steam locomotive through a hole the size of a postage stamp. An artefact that is the fruit of hundreds of person-years is only ever seen by anyone through a lOO-line window. In some ways it is astonishing that such large systems work at all. But parallel programming is much, much harder. There are so many more things to go wrong. Debugging is a nightmare. A bug that shows up on one run may never happen when you are looking for it - but unfailingly returns as soon as your attention moves elsewhere. A large fraction of the program's code can be made up of marshalling and coordination algorithms. The core application can easily be obscured by a maze of plumbing. Functional programming is a radical, elegant, high-level attack on the programming problem. Radical, because it dramatically eschews side-effects; elegant, because of its close connection with mathematics; high-level, be cause you can say a lot in one line. But functional programming is definitely not (yet) mainstream. That's the trouble with radical approaches: it's hard for them to break through and become mainstream. But that doesn't make functional programming any less fun, and it has turned out to be a won derful laboratory for rich type systems, automatic garbage collection, object models, and other stuff that has made the jump into the mainstream.

This is the first comprehensive account of this new approach to the fundamentals of parallel programming.

On the 23rd of April, 2001, the 6th Workshop on High-Level Parallel P- gramming Models and Supportive Environments (LCTES’98) was held in San Francisco. HIPShas been held over the past six years in conjunction with IPDPS, the Internation Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium. The HIPSworkshop focuses on high-level programming of networks of wo- stations, computing clusters and of massively-parallel machines. Its goal is to bring together researchers working in the areas of applications, language design, compilers, system architecture and programming tools to discuss new devel- ments in programming such systems. In recent years, several standards have emerged with an increasing demand of support for parallel and distributed processing. On one end, message-passing frameworks, such as PVM, MPI and VIA, provide support for basic commu- cation. On the other hand, distributed object standards, such as CORBA and DCOM, provide support for handling remote objects in a client-server fashion but also ensure certain guarantees for the quality of services. The key issues for the success of programming parallel and distributed en- ronments are high-level programming concepts and e?ciency. In addition, other quality categories have to be taken into account, such as scalability, security, bandwidth guarantees and fault tolerance, just to name a few. Today’s challenge is to provide high-level programming concepts without s- ri?cing e?ciency. This is only possible by carefully designing for those concepts and by providing supportive programming environments that facilitate program development and tuning.

The articles in this volume are revised versions of the best papers presented at the Fifth Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing, held at Yale University, August 1992. The previous workshops in this series were held in Santa Clara (1991), Irvine (1990), Urbana (1989), and Ithaca (1988). As in previous years, a reasonable cross-section of some of the best work in the field is presented. The volume contains 35 papers, mostly by authors working in the U.S. or Canada but also by authors from Austria, Denmark, Israel, Italy, Japan and the U.K.

This set of technical books contains all the information presented at the 1995 International Conference on Parallel Processing. This conference, held August 14 - 18, featured over 100 lectures from more than 300 contributors, and included three panel sessions and three keynote addresses. The international authorship includes experts from around the globe, from Texas to Tokyo, from Leiden to London. Compiled by faculty at the University of Illinois and sponsored by Penn State University, these Proceedings are a comprehensive look at all that's new in the field of parallel processing.