from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
Program Composition Notation
(PCN) A specification language for parallelism between {C} and
{Fortran} {modules}. PCN provides a simple language for
specifying {concurrent} {algorithms}, interfaces to {Fortran}
and {C}, a portable toolkit that allows applications to be
developed on a {workstation} or small parallel computer and
run unchanged on {supercomputers} and integrated debugging and
performance analysis tools. PCN was developed at {Argonne
National Laboratory} and the {California Institute of
Technology}. It has been used to develop a wide variety of
applications, in areas such as climate modelling, fluid
dynamics, computational biology, chemistry, and circuit
simulation.
Version 2.0 runs on networks of workstations: {Sun-4}, {NeXT},
{RS/6000}, {SGI}; {multicomputers}: {iPSC}/860, {Touchstone
DELTA}; and {shared memory} multiprocessors:
{Symmetry}/{Dynix}.
(ftp://info.mcs.anl.gov/pub/pcn).
E-mail: Ian Foster <[email protected]>, Steve Tuecke
<[email protected]>.
["Productive Parallel Programming: The PCN Approach",
I. Foster et al, Sci Prog 1(1):51-66 (1992)].
(1993-02-12)