报 告 人：图灵奖得主Niklaus Wirth教授 瑞士(苏黎世) 联邦理工学院
报告日期/时间：2012年5月 24日（周四）10:00～11:30
报告地点：校本部图书馆报告厅
邀 请 人：缪淮扣 教授
Abstract：
Parallelism has for a long time played a minor role in programming. There are several reasons for this. First, it presents a new class of difficulties. Mistakes cannot be located by simple testing. Second, it is simulated and hardly effective if executed on single-processor hardware. Recently, single chips with multiple processors have become available, and thereby parallelism has gained a new perspective. It is no longer simulated, but genuine. We briefly review the history of parallel programming, and then expand on the possibilities to custom-design multi-processor hardware configured to specific applications. This is possible by using field-programmable devices (FPGA). In this way, the number and kind of processors is not fixed by a given chip, but is determined by the application and by its designer. Furthermore, we suggest that a single language should cover both, hardware configuration and software, supporting the trend to integrated hardware-software codesin. As an aside, we discover that the Universal Multiprocessor, as a counterpart of von Neumann"s ingenious Universal Single processor emerges as a myth.
Biography：
Niklaus Wirth was born in February 1934 in Winterthur, Switzerland. He studied electrical engineering at ETH (Federal Institute of Technology) in Zürich, graduated in 1959, and received a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1963. Wirth has been an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University (1963-67) and, after his return to Switzerland, a Professor of Informatics at ETH from 1968 – 1999. His principal areas of contribution were programming languages and methodology, software engineering, and design of personal workstations. He has designed the programming languages Algol W (1965), Pascal (1970), Modula-2 (1979) and Oberon (1988), was involved in the methodologies of Structured Programming and Stepwise Refinement, and designed and built the workstations Lilith (1980) and Ceres (1986). He has published several text books for courses on programming, algorithms and data structures, and logical design of digital circuits. He has received many prizes and honorary doctorates, including the Turing Award (1984), the IEEE Computer Pioneer (1988), the Award for outstanding contributions to Computer Science Education (ACM 1987), and the IBM Europe Science and Technology Award in 1989.