Using CSP languages to program parallel workstation systems

During the last decade one of the most relevant events in the computer market has been the large diffusion of workstations. In both industrial and research environments a huge amount of computing is done on personal workstations. Despite the rapid growth in networking technologies, however, a network of workstations cannot be easily seen as a global computational resource, although it represents a large amount of computing power. Moreover, its inherent parallelism is not accessible without a heavy effort to modify existing software and/or to develop new code. It is our belief that the CSP model is suitable to develop distributed applications for a particular class of such systems that can be defined Parallel Workstation Systems. This thesis has been tested in the course of the DISC project. In DISC, the language implementation of the CSP model tries to minimize the programming effort toward the development of parallel applications, and a friendly programming environment, integrated in the native workbench of workstations, is provided.