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From: Brad Moore <brad.moore@shaw.ca>
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Subject: ANN: Paraffin 4.1, Parallelism Generics
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Date: 2013-05-04T00:33:55-06:00
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The next release of Paraffin, Paraffin 4.1 is now available for download.

Paraffin is a suite of Ada 2012 generics that facilitates writing 
parallel programs featuring divide and conquer parallelism.

The generics includes support for parallel loops and
parallel recursive subprograms.

In addition, there are non-Ravenscar versions of the generics,
paraffinalia, and test programs, as well as Ravenscar versions. The 
Ravenscar versions satisy the restrictions
defined in the Ravenscar Profile.

Recursive parallelism also includes stack safe parallelism, which
provides assurances that recursion will not overflow the stack.
This feature also benefits single processor as well as multicore.

In addition, Paraffin comes with Paraffinalia, which is a suite
of parallel algorithms designed for reuse that includes;

- Parallel Integration of arbitrary functions
- Parallel solving of matrices
- Parallel Quicksort
- Parallel Fast Fourier Transform
- Parallel Red Black Tree
- Parallel Linked Lists
- Parallel cumulative sum


The main features of this new release are;

    - Fixed a bug in all the recursive work sharing generics that would
      cause the program to hang if the actual number of workers used is
      less than the number of requested workers.

    - If exceptions are raised in worker tasks, it is the first
      exception raised that is reraised in the sequential task when the
      parallelism completes, instead of the last exception raised.

    - Added Usage output for all the test drivers, which gets displayed
      if any app is executed without any command line parameters.

    - The Test_Parallel_Loops, and Test_Ravenscar_Parallel_Loops apps
      would hang without producing any output when run on Windows. This
      bug has been fixed.

    - Reducing_Doubly_Linked_Lists abstraction now has reducing functions
      for splicing at the beginning of the list and at the end. This
      allows for both forward and reverse parallel loops involving list
      concatentation, which is demonstrated in a test program.

    - The Parallel Integrate applet in Paraffinalia now accepts an
      accuracy parameter that controls how much processing needs to
      occur.

    - Pre and post conditions added to the Paraffinalia generics.
    - Quicksort now works on small arrays in parallel, as small as one
      element arrays.
    - global_pragma configuration file that turns on portability checks
      for all the paraffinalia apps and test drivers.
    - Stack Safe tests and generics now working for the quicksort and
      integrate parafinalia apps.
    - Red_Black_Tree container doesn't Clear list in parallel, which was
      causing problems when tree if finalized after main task completes.

The latest stable release and older releases may be downloaded from;

  https://sourceforge.net/projects/paraffin/files/

For those who want the current development versions of the source they
can download using git (http://git-scm.com/) by issuing the following
commands;

  mkdir sandbox
  cd sandbox
  git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/paraffin/code paraffin-code

The current development version typically will correspond to the latest
stable release, but may at times be unstable when new features are being
worked on.

-- Brad