Report on FGCS Project
H. Gallaire
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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