Initiative in Innovative Computing Seminar Series Wednesday, September 27, 2006; 4pm Guy L. Steele Jr., Sun Fellow Sun Microsystems, Inc. http://iic.harvard.edu/events/ The Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC) is pleased to announce the 2006-2007 Seminar Series. You are invited to join us for the first seminar on September 27th with Guy Steele to kick-off our series. Dr. Steele is a researcher with Sun Microsystems Laboratories, working on the Programming Language Research project. His research interests include Algorithms, Compilation, Distributed Systems, High Performance Computing, Java, Lisp Scheme, Object Oriented Programming, Operating Systems, Programming Languages, Software, and Supercomputer design. Seminar Title: The Fortress Programming Language Seminar Abstract: The Programming Language Research Group at Sun Microsystems Laboratories is trying to apply lessons learned from the Java (TM) Programming Language to the next generation of programming languages. The Java language supports platform-independent parallel programming with explicit multithreading and explicit locks. As part of the DARPA program for High Productivity Computing Systems, we are developing Fortress, a language intended to support large-scale scientific computation. One of the design principles is that parallelism be encouraged everywhere (for example, it is intentionally just a little bit harder to write a sequential loop than a parallel loop). Another design principle is to have rich mechanisms for encapsulation and abstraction; the idea is to have a fairly complicated language for library writers that enables them to write libraries that present a relatively simple set of interfaces to the application programmer. A third design principle is to try to use standard mathematical notation as part of the programming language wherever possible; this is an old idea that failed in the 1960s, but the modern widespread acceptance of Unicode makes it easier to revisit the idea. We will discuss these design principles and show some examples of Fortress code to illustrate them. Seminar Series schedule is available on the IIC website – http:// iic.harvard.edu/events.php. The website will be updated often with additional information and seminars. All IIC seminars will be held at the 60 Oxford Street Building, Room 330 unless otherwise noted. Day and Time: Wednesday, September 27, 2006 - 4:00pm Location: 60 Oxford Street, Room 330 Parking: Parking is available in the 52 Oxford Street Garage. Please tell the attendant that you are attending the IIC Seminar. A map is available on line at http:// iic.harvard.edu/contactphp. _______________________________________________ iic-seminars mailing list iic-seminars(a)calists.harvard.edu http://calists.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/iic-seminars