Evaluation of the FGCS Project

David H. D. Warren
Department of Computer Science
University of Bristol

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research and development achievements of ICOT are on a par with the three institu-
tions, MCC, ECRC and SICS, which are most comparable with ICOT and which are 
representative of the very highest level of computing research in the world. Moreover it 
should not be forgotten that those three institutions came into being largely following 
in the footsteps of ICOT and the FGCS project. 

Recommended Future Steps 

I strongly recommend that ICOT's work should be continued in some form beyond 
the 1993 official end date of the FGCS project. The nucleus of highly gifted people 
and expertise built up at ICOT should not be allowed to evaporate, but should be 
continued within a smaller and more flexible framework. The KL1 software should be 
made available on widely available standard hardware, including Unix uniprocessors 
and multiprocessors such as Sequent Symmetry and perhaps BBN Butterfly. The PIM 
hardware should be examined to see whether it might potentially form the basis for 
commercial products if standard languages and operating system were supported. More 
effort should be put into evaluating the FGCS results, and especially in comparing the 
performance and usability with the best conventional alternatives. Speedups and good 
load balancing are not enough by themselves; one needs to show that applications 
perform better than they would by other approaches with comparable implementation 
effort. There should also be continuing research, especially in the areas of knowledge 
processing and applications. I would suggest that all this would best be done within 
a much smaller research institute, with selected long-term staff, and a focussed but 
flexible ongoing research programme (c.f. for example SICS). 

It is understood that MITI is anxious to have official overseas collaboration in any 
extension of the FGCS work. My own group would be interested in collaborating 
with ICOT (or its successor) in evaluating ICOT's parallel applications developed in 
KL1, to see to what extent the same problems can be solved through more directly 
declarative logic programs, and whether comparable performance and parallelism can 
be obtained from logic programming implementations supporting implicit parallelism 
(such as Andorra-I). Unfortunately, DTI (the UK counterpart of MITI) requires 50% 
funding from UK industry for any research it supports. So long as the ICOT work is 
only available on custom hardware, it is unlikely that UK industry would be interested. 
And even if the ICOT software were ported to standard hardware, the likely payoff 
from such research is too long-term for most UK industry (with its rather short-term 
horizons). Therefore, I am afraid the chances of official UK involvement, through DTI, 
in continuations of the FGCS work seem poor, for the near term at least. 


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