Preface CPA 2015

Communicating Process Architectures (CPA) 2015 is the thirty-seventh in the WoTUG series of conferences and took place from Sunday August 23th to Wednesday August 26th 2015, hosted by the School of Computing at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England.

Keynote talks this year were from David May (FRS) and Eric Verhulst. David, of course, was the architect of the Inmos Transputer – the first microprocessor designed to support multiprocessing – and the designer of the occam concurrent programming language. His most recent venture is XMOS, which he co-founded in 2005 and which develops and markets multicore multiprocessors for embedded applications together with the all-important software tools for harnessing them (i.e. concurrent design, reasoning and programming). David's talk reviews and forecasts the development of the ideas behind Communicating Processes and Processors from 1975 through 2025. Eric led the development of the Virtuoso multi-board RTOS, used in the ESA's Rosetta space mission to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Virtuoso and its successor developments, OpenComRTOS and VirtuosoNext, all apply valuable principles and lessons learned from CSP, the transputer and occam. Eric's talk relates his own personal journey through the challenges of parallel programming, leading to the realisation of industrial applications based on viewing complex systems as a set of interacting entities exchanging information according to laws formalised in CSP – and the success that has resulted.

Fifteen papers were accepted for presentation at the conference, following the strong editorial process developed and refined by CPA over many years. They cover a spectrum of concurrency concerns: mathematical theory, programming languages, design and support tools, verification, multicore infrastructure and applications ranging from supercomputing to embedded. Three workshops were included in the conference, asking questions about the use of concurrency in modern High Performance Computing, how to work with and model analog (e.g. continuous time) and digital mechanisms in real-world hybrid systems, and how to classify and usefully benchmark the many languages and support libraries now available for message-passing concurrency. The conference also hosted two evening fringe sessions, for reporting most recent work, floating wild ideas and/or challenging received wisdom. The workshop position papers and fringe abstracts are included in these Proceedings. Altogether, contributions came from twelve different countries: Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the USA.

Finally, we thank everyone who submitted papers, the reviewers for their conscientious and very hard work, the delegates attending for their contributions that make it all worthwhile and the secretaries and conference officers who just make it work. Thank you all very much.

Kevin Chalmers (Edinburgh Napier University)

Jan Bækgaard Pedersen (University of Nevada Las Vegas)

Frederick R.M. Barnes (University of Kent)

Jan F. Broenink (University of Twente)

Ruth Ivimey-Cook (eLifesciences Ltd.)

Adam Sampson (Abertay University)

Peter H. Welch (University of Kent)

Preface CPA 2016

Communicating Process Architectures (CPA) 2016 is the thirty-eighth in the WoTUG series of conferences and took place from Sunday August 21st to Tuesday August 23rd 2016, hosted by the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. This sees the first visit to a Scandinavian country for this conference.

The keynote talk this year was from Markus Jochum from the Niels Bohr Institute. His talk, “Computational Challenges for Climate Modelling” presented two key issues facing climate science and climate modelling: turbulence in the fluid dynamics of oceans and establishing the fidelity of the models (by demonstrating their accuracy over pre-historic warm periods). Both require an order of magnitude faster and higher resolution integration than is available even on today's massively parallel computing architectures and need to take into account Earth's full carbon biochemistry. Dr. Jochum completed his PhD in physical oceanography in 2002 at MIT. He then worked for 8 years as ocean model developer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, USA. Since 2012, he has been Professor for Physical Oceanography at the Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen.

Fourteen papers were accepted for presentation at the conference and publication in these proceedings, following the strong editorial process developed and refined by CPA over many years. They cover a full spectrum of concurrency concerns – from mathematical theory, design and programming language and support tools, verification, multicore run-time infrastructure through to applications at all levels from supercomputing to embedded. One of the fourteen papers was presented as a workshop on building sensor systems for a large scale Arctic observatory. This year's submissions came from Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Malta, the UK and the USA.

As usual, the conference also hosted fringe sessions presenting work in progress, new ideas, demonstrations and concerns that certain common practices in concurrency are harmful. This year, we had 5 such fringe presentations and their abstracts can be found in these proceedings.

Finally, we thank everyone who submitted papers, the reviewers for their conscientious and very hard work, the delegates attending for their contributions that make it all worthwhile and the secretaries and conference officers who just make it work. Thank you all very much.

Kevin Chalmers (Edinburgh Napier University)

Jan Bækgaard Pedersen (University of Nevada Las Vegas)

Kenneth Skovhede (University of Copenhagen)

Brian Vinter (University of Copenhagen)

Peter H. Welch (University of Kent)