1. Parallel (Design) Example
1. SICSA Multicore Challenge
   
   
2. Brief Historical Overview
1. The Transputer
2. occam
   
   
3. Three Case Studies
1. Mobile Robotics (LEGO RCX)
2. The Flying Gator
3. Environmental Sensing

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

1. Traditionally
1. Performance
2. Performance
3. Performance
   
   
2. In My Humble Opinion (IMHO)
1. Organization / Modularity
2. Safety
3. Comprehension
4. Extensibility
   
   (... with the right tools)

1. Parallel programming language
2. History
   
1. Inspiration: CSP (Hoare, late 60's)
2. Early 80's U. Bristol
3. Opened/released mid-90's
3. Notable Constructs
1. SEQ / PAR / ALT
4. "Bytecode for the Transputer"

• A behaviorist approach to AI / control
  
• Rodney Brooks (MIT), 1990's
• Roomba ("Behavior Language")
  most prominent, modern use of this 
  model of control today.
  
  
  
• Difficult to use without language
  support due to highly parallel nature.

• Layers of control
• Modular design
• Complexity through composition
• Complexity through iterative design
  
  
  
• Modern systems (distributed VMs, DBs, etc.)
  would benefit from similarly modular designs
• Or, are we already there?