The infrastructure award is for the acquisition of equipment to develop a laboratory for parallel processing. The major acquisition is a 64 processor MIMD (Multiple Instruction, Multiple Data) parallel computer and workstations. Research will be performed in software engineering, parallel algorithms and data structures, networks and simulation, computer vision, and database management systems. The advent of new architecture parallel computers has opened new areas of research related to the effective use of these computers. The MIMD computers work by allowing individual processors to operate on independent data streams. The discovery of algorithms to effectively use this type of architecture is a major research question crossing several disciplines. The parallel processing laboratory at the University of Florida is investigating several research topics ranging from experimental algorithm studies to computer vision applications. In particular: 1. The software engineering group is developing a parallel programming language environment to be used in the development of parallel programs in conjunction with a knowledge based development and maintenance environment. 2. The parallel algorithms group is concentrating on experimentally determining bottlenecks with both processor communication and input/output devices. The experimental results will be compared with theoretical models of performance. 3. The network and simulation group is using the parrallel computer as both an experimental testbed for load balancing and other performance enhancing algorithms and as a computational resource to perform complex simulations. 4. The computer vision group is developing algorithms to utilize parallelism. There is a natural match between many vision applications and the MIMD architecture. 5. The database management group is designing algorithms to implement an object oriented semantic database model on a MIMD architecture computer. //
