ERCIM News No.20 - January 1995

SZTAKI - The Bootstrap Institute EEIG has accepted in September STAKI as a full member. The Bootstrap Institute is a European non-profit organization established with the aim of further development of the Bootstrap methodology which was elaborated within the ESPRIT programme. The Bootstrap methodology is aiming at monitoring, evaluating and improving the quality of software development processes. It is based on the five-grade maturity model of the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie-Mellon University as well as on the software quality standards of ISO, ESA, DoD, IEEE, NATO. The BOOTSTRAP Institute participates in ISO activities related to software quality and maintains close contacts with the European Software Institute.
CWI - Professor Cor Baayen, ERCIM's first president (1991-1994), has retired from his position as scientific director of CWI. On the occasion of his departure a scientific symposium was held on 20 December in Amsterdam. Speakers included Prof. Dana Scott from Carnegie Mellon University, ERCIM vice-president Prof. Alain Bensoussan from INRIA and Dr. Jan Borgman, chairman of the Board of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research NWO. Prof. Baayen will remain professor of mathematics at the Free University of Amsterdam.
INESC - The research Group on Dynamical Systems Control of INESC is involved in a project aiming at the development of advanced control software for solar power plants. The project, leaded by CIEMAT (Spain) is being conducted under the HCM Programme and involves several european research institutions. Tests are performed at Plataforma Solar de Almeria (PSA), a large scale facility of CIEMAT, located in the south of Spain. The role of INESC is to develop and test software for Adaptive Predictive Control of the temperature at the outlet of a parabolic-through solar collector field. The project started in January 1994 and will last for two years. In the tests conducted so far, the controller developed by INESC was able to achieve quite a good performance.
GMD - Dr. Thomas Brandes and Falk Zimmermann, both scientists at the GMD Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computations, have received the ECCO-Achievement Award 1994 from the IBM European Cluster and Parallel Consortium. Their work falls into the category "Software Development Tools". The prize was presented to the scientists at the SuPeur '94 conference in Amsterdam. Brandes and Zimmermann have developed the software tool ADAPTOR (Automatic Data Parallelism Translator) which allows using data-parallel languages like Connection Machine Fortran (CMF) and High Performance Fortran (HPF) on all important parallel architectures with distributed memory.

Dr. Thomas Brandes Falk Zimmermann