Communicating Process Architectures 2003 : WoTUG-26: Proceedings of the 26th WoTUG Technical Meeting, 7-10 September 2003, University of Twente, the Netherlands

Communicating Process Architectures addresses many of the key issues in modern computer science and practice. The themes in this publication will concern concurrency at all levels of software and hardware granularity. It stimulates the discussion and ideas as to the role concurrency will play in the future generation of scalable computer infrastructure and applications - where scaling means the ability to ramp up functionality (i.e. stay in control as complexity increases) as well as physical metrics (such as performance). Traditionally, concurrency has been taught and considered and experienced as an advanced and difficult topic. The thesis underlying this publication is that this tradition is wrong. The natural world operates through the continuous interaction of massive numbers of autonomous agents at all levels of granularity (astronomic, human, sub-atomic). If modern computer science finds concurrency hard, then it is probably not doing it right. Research and development in the field of communicating process architectures show that concurrency simplifies software and hardware architectures in a natural way how we think about systems, while managing complexity and enhancing performance. The WoTUG forum aims to continue the successful series of yearly conferences. They have consistently proven to be a valuable meeting place for all those interested in the problems and opportunities thrown up by parallel computing and concurrency. The papers in this proceedings, reflect a wide spectrum of disciplines - theory, software architecture, hardware architecture, hardware / software co-design, embedded systems design, languages for concurrency, tooling design and applications.