Report on FGCS Project

H. Gallaire

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the project was launched. This is not, to me, a surprise at all, i.e. I have never believed 
that very significant parts of this grand plan could be successfully tackled. 

I was expecting however to see "actual use" of some of the technology at the end 
of the project. There are three ways in which this could have happened. The first 
way would have been to have real world applications, in user terms: only little of that 
can be seen at this stage, even though the efforts to develop demonstrators are not 
be be underestimated. The second would have been to the benefit of computer sys-
tems themselves (eg impacting the computer manufacturers); this does not appear to 
be directly happening, at least not now and this is disappointing if only because the 
Japanese manufacturers have been involved in the FGCS project, at least as providers 
of human resources and as subcontractors; whether this lack is due to the fact that 
not enough effort went into getting their true support (which may have been a tough 
issue after TRON and SIGMA) or not, is difficult to assess from a distance, and the 
responsibility for that state of affairs certainly lie in several hands. However, I firmly 
believe that when Japanese industry starts looking for engineers and designers for par-
allel systems (which may already be the case), they will draw heavily on the skills 
developed at ICOT in the FGCS project; indeed what has been learned through the 
development of many versions of machines, of parallel OS, of cache management and of 
load distribution algorithms, of distribution networks, etc will undoubtedly be useful 
to them. The third way would have been to impact computer science outside of the 
direct field in which this research takes place: for example to impact AI, to impact 
software engineering, etc; not a lot can yet be seen, but there are promising signs, eg 
the results on AI in legal reasoning or theorem proving; by the way there are again di-
rect ways and indirect ways through which the project impacts these fields: by making 
sheer use of the powerful hardware technology and making practical what was known 
but was impractical on conventional hardware (the parallel theorem prover is one such 
example), or by true innovation using the new tools of the project ; there are certainly 
several examples of the latter (eg CAL, QUIXOTE, ...); it seems to me however that 
there has been more reliance on the use of the power of parallelism; this is probably 
natural since developing parallel systems was and still is the major technical thrust 
of the project; one can only wonder what are the limits of this position, as we were 
reminded by A. Robinson quoting M. Minsky during his invited talk at FGCS'92. More 
application work would have been needed to feel fully optimistic about the impact on 
the environment of this work. 

The project made a choice of one approach of symbolic computing, namely logic 
programming (LP); it pursued it very consistently; this is a very wise behavior, and 
I did the same at ECRC. ICOT went very far, building many different pieces of 
hardware (convincing us if needed of the exceptional manner in which technology is 
mastered in Japan), building full operating systems with great success, investigating 
many solutions in parallel. If one wants to establish a new center, I would recommend 
to follow the same pattern, namely stick to one type of technology, especially when it is 


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