This award will support the participation of eight U.S. scientists in a U.S.-Japan Seminar on Parallel Symbolic Computing: Languages, Systems, and Applications, to be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts October 13-16, 1992. The co-organizers are Professor Anant Agarwal of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and Robert Halstead of Digital Equipment Corporation, and Professor Takayasu Ito, Department of Information Engineering, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan. The objectives of the seminar are to bring U.S. and Japanese researchers together to discuss important common theoretical and implementation problems, application areas for parallel symbolic computing, how to move parallelism into wider use for symbolic computing, and opportunities for research collaboration. Parallel and distributed computing are becoming increasingly important as cost-effective ways to achieve high computational performance. Symbolic computing is widespread in applications and hence parallel symbolic computing is important, but symbolic computations are notable for their use of irregular data structures (such as trees, lists, and graphs) and irregular, data-driven operations on them. As a result, parallel symbolic computing has its own distinctive set of technical challenges. The seminar will be valuable in making researchers in the United States and Japan more aware of progress in the other country as well as helping them learn more about research in their own countries.
