Subject: Monthly Message and Timely Reminders (Updated 10/08/92) Last Updated: Point 8 on commercialism. 1. Unless there is specific language to the contrary, each message represents only the personal opinion of its author. 2. I usually only edit for obvious problems. The News software is a stickler for two things: a. Too much included material for the new material which was posted. b. Too long a signature. If a. happens and it is not totally obvious what should be stricken, I will return it to the author. If b. happens, I strike out enough to get the article out. The poster should take some time to get the Subject line correct. Like a technical article in a journal, people are drawn by the apparent subject. Posting a follow-up message with an inappropriate subject is the quickest way to guarantee no one will read your post. 3. When you send a message to comp.parallel and it comes through to either fpst@hubcap.clemson.edu or hypercube-request@hubcap.clemson.edu, I understand that to mean that you want me to post it to usenet, which means it will be sent to tens of thousands of potential readers at thousands of computers all around the world. I also mail out copies of each message to readers around the world --- please try to write your article so all can read them. If you don't want me to post something, send it instead to steve@hubcap.clemson.edu. 4. Although I'd try to avoid sending along anything that obviously was out of line, if an individual has access to confidential info, it has to be up to that individual to protect it. Since secrets rarely come labeled as such, even if we wanted to there's not much we could to do to identify them. Remember, in our business there's a lot of non-disclosure stuff running around. I can't check that aspect for you. 5. The archives are kept in the anonymous ftp directory for hubcap.clemson.edu under the directory pub/parallel. ftp> open hubcap.clemson.edu ftp> cd pub/parallel ftp> bin ftp> get hyperarchive Information on how to use ftp is appended on the back of this message. 6. Moderated groups get all articles which are to be posted to a mix of moderated and unmoderated groups. By courtesy, if comp.parallel is not the only moderated group, I pass the message on to the other moderators. If you are making an announcement that goes to everyone in the world, it takes a long time to clear us all. Please help in those cases wherein you have lots of groups to post to. 7. FAQ and their answers: Linda - anonymous ftp to hubcap.clemson.edu, cd pub/parallel, get Linda.info Curricula - I keep a list of curricula by schools. anonymous ftp to hubcap.clemson.edu, cd pub/parallel/schools. Do `ls'. Hopefully, I have abbreviated school names in an obvious manner. Otherwise, do `mget *'. 8. Commercialism and the Net. The official policy of the net is to not allow commercial enterprises to advertise. This comes up from time to time. The policy of this moderator has been to publish things which are of interest to the group. This includes such things as news releases and product announcements from manufacturers and vendors. This is subject to scrutiny by me and if I think that these things are blantant marketing with no empirical support, I will either reject or ask the submitter to rewrite. 9. There is also a copy of several of Eugene Miya's ``must read'' lists in ``refer'' format. (For refer format, see ``man addbib'' in Unix). Eugene has his very large bibliography which he tries to keep up to date. There are several others who are bibliographers: Eugene Miya eugene@wilbur.nas.nasa.gov (See Note at bottom for details for obtaining bibliography.) Just about everything If you are going to post references, it would help if you place them in refer format or note if you grabbed them from Eugene's database. That way you save him some reformatting or inclusion work when he grabs them (however imperfect) for the biblio. Darrell Long darrell@jupiter.ucsc.edu Distributed Operating Systems Qiang Yi Luo qyl@computer-science.strathclyde.ac.uk Distributed AI NIST Benchmarking daemon/server Stanford FTP (Vaughn Pratt) ftp to boole.stanford.edu (36.8.0.65) pub/README theory of concurrency Chuck Romine romine@xagsun.epm.ornl.gov Parallel and Vector Numerical Algorithms (ICASE Interim report 6 or ORNL/TM-10998) David Skillicorn skill@qucis.queensu.ca (1) The language Lucid (the stream language, not the AI one) and Parallel compilation (i.e. the compilers themselves are parallel) Steve Stevenson steve@hubcap.clemson.edu Semantics of parallel languages ============================FTP Lessons======================================= From eugene@nas.nasa.gov Thu Feb 20 12:06:09 1992 Subject: Quick lesson on anonymous FTP I have received several pieces of mail about anonymous FTP and how to use it. I find it distressing that computer science people sometimes lack exposure to this, but I can understand when others outside the discipline of CS don't: you don't find this material in text books. FTP: File Transfer Protocol/Program, a quick lesson ftp is a program found on many interconnected systems. It has a long and checkered life, and I expect people will see it easily into the 21st century. Ftp hides a lot of problems and issues about computers and people communicating to one another. I first encountered an ftp command in 1973 on an IBM 360/75. This is significant for reasons I won't go into, but this program changed my life (remember those were the days of punched cards back then and I am not that old). To use ftp, you can skip a lot of the commands with 'man ftp' or 'help ftp' (on Unix or VMS systems, and you will probably find some description on CMS), your site requires some prerequisites: your site first requires full connectivity to the Internet. This is not cheap and a common carrier some place will want many $xxx,xxxs. Some would say you can't afford to live without it (especially if you are in a CS department). We can tell that you reading this note means you have at least a mail service. Ftp needs more. You can get some of this information from the Network Information Center, the NIC, and certain people on some groups. The past has its own color. Using ftp requires retaining a concept of "here" and "there" (local and remote). Do not get confused. Without getting into the details, you want to transfer a file from some remote machine to some local host. SO you need a remote host. (For testing purposes, you can in fact use your own host (this is referred as "loopback"). You typically issue the command ftp remote.host.domain (1) You can also just say ftp (2) You get a prompt like: ftp> (3) The idea of maintaining an FTP dialogue is patterned somewhat after a telephone conversation: you open a connection, you identify yourself, you do your work (transfer files), you close the connection. Note: that last sentence generalizes a LOT of issues on computer security, data format conversion, etc. Proceeding past this point is serious computing. This is how it can change your life. Ftp has a built in "help" command, you can type this and wander thru the meanings of commands (this exploration was part of hacking in the early days, when few systems did not has passwords). You can also usually just type '?' as a help command as well (I think an old DEC-10ism, remember I did not start on a 10). If you started with (1), you have to identify yourself first. This works with (3). If you issue (1), the next stage is to identify yourself. Most ftp commands assume your local computer (username) as the default. THIS IS WHERE THE UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES COME IN. The remote machine has to know who you are, but one account name you can use on some systems is "anonymous." This was a design decision back into the early net days to allow sharing of data (why some might accuse ARPA of socialistic). After typing on the username (your name, someone elses name, or "anonmymous," the next prompt asks for a password. You give the system your password (sometimes dangerous, but so is remote terminal emulation). For "anonymous" the convention is to use any word like "guest" or "visitor" or yourname@host. This CAN be used for accounting purposes, but many sites, especially edu sites, do not, unless they happen to be looking for system crackers. Your connection is accepted or rejected. We assume you are on. You are typically given limited access to files on a system. The basic commands of FTP are to "get" files or "put" files. If you forget, get and put ask you for file names. Some ftp programs implement the Kleene operator (*) (aka wildcard). Not all. You can also ask for connection status, 'cd' for changing directories, 'pwd' for printing the working directory, list contents, etc. Now what you may not realize is that the terminology I use for this description is highly system dependent. I could have used DATASET NAME (or DSN), you need to be aware that different character sets are out there (I started life believing that EBCDIC was the one true character set). I deliberately inserted TABs in the above message (TAB is a fun character handled in vastly different ways on different systems). The "binary" option is sometimes important. Ftp tries to handle these differences. There are people in the computing world who have never heard of a directory. Some are reading right now. Like I said, you can learn a lot about computers. To get out of a connection (after learning about help), you "close," or type "bye" or "quit" or facsimile. Closing finishes a session, but keeps the FTP program running. How do you find hosts? That is for you to figure out. For instance, years ago I anticipated having to give lessons like this, so the parallel processing bibliography does not sit on this host or other NASA host (I also appreciate you not keeping your copies where others outside your site can't test). You will learn about hosts on your own reading net postings. One thing I should mention was this was at first restricted to the US with the ARPAnet. The wider Internet spans from Australia up to the former Iron Curtin. Do not abuse anonymous FTP (people ARE in many ways, like placing alt.sex.pictures GIFs [what's a GIF?] on remote hosts). As such, we do not allow anonymous FTP on most of our hosts (but who knows? maybe your commercially purchased system came with it enabled: test exercise for the reader: do you trust your vendor?). So this is another network service. Yet another two edged sword. This is deliberately simplifed and generalized. It has a colorful history, unfortunately the golden age of simply logging into a remote machine without a password has passed with people somewhat fearful of door rattlers. It is not for the weak at heart. Exercise: crack into a system using.... No just joking. Questions? ====================Net Lib Instructions============================ From: eugene@nas.nasa.gov (Eugene N. Miya) Subject: Using Netlib and Citlib 1) [Netlib has recently been updated. However, this write-up should suffice to get started.] The most famous is netlib by Eric Grosse and Jack Dongarra. Two exist: one at AT&T research the other is at ornl.gov). A CACM paper exists which describes them, but the best thing to do is play: send an email test message to netlib@ornl.gov The commands are simple: send index or send xxx assuming you know what xxx is. You can also see directories in the index (usually) and say send index from DDDD when you see the file or source code you say send xxx from DDDD This commands can appear in either the mail subject field or message body. That's about it. I have my cron file send a "send index" message every so often to check for changes. 2) NISTLIB: same server, different source code and directories. A collection of benchmarks the NBS (now NIST) put together for an ONR contract. nistlib@cmr.ncsl.nist.gov 3) citlib: citlib@hamlet.caltech.edu is the old address, it forwards to a new host. ============================================================ The parallel/distributed processing bibliography (in machine readable form) is documented in ACM CAN [Computer Architecture News] March 1985. It began with a bibliography published in 1980 by %A M. Satyanarayanan %T Multiprocessing: an annotated bibliography %J Computer %V 13 %N 5 %D May 1980 %P 101-116 %X Excellent reference source, but dated. Text reproduced with the permission of Prentice-Hall \(co 1980. $Revision: 1.2 $ $Date: 84/07/05 16:58:56 $ My work is considerably larger (about 80 times). In order to obtain a copy on the ARPAnet, I am required to ask for a letterhead from an institution stating that they understand portions are copywritten. It's free, so that is not much to ask. Please also send any corrections, typos, additions to me. Annotations and keywords are particularly encouraged, since I can't read everything. Citation in any of your published work is appreciated since this supports my work. Send letterhead to: E. Miya MS 258-5 NASA Ames Research Center Moffett Field, CA 94035 Please include your return Email address. I maintain copies on some sites, your site may have one already. Check with your site admin. If you are not on the ARPAnet, you can obtain an older version (with source files) from COSMIC Univ. of Georgia Athens, GA It's ASCII/refer (that's the format above) bibliographic, tar/Unix tape format. There is a tape handling charge. Special requests: IBM format tapes, VMS BACKUP format are also possible, ask me, not COSMIC for these. Distribution is now restricted to North America, but I am trying to get world-wide distribution again.