Preface CPA 2017

Communicating Process Architectures (CPA) 2017 is the thirty-ninth in the WoTUG series of conferences and took place from Sunday August 20th to Wednesday August 23th 2017, hosted by Dr. Kevin Vella of the University of Malta at the Victoria Hotel in Sliema, Malta.

The keynote talk was given by Dr. Peter Welch from the University of Kent at Canterbury, and it was titled “A Workflow Methodology for Realising Concurrent and Verified Systems”. The keynote was co-authored by Dr. Jan B. Pedersen from the University of Nevada Las Vegas. Dr. Welch has been a professor at the University of Kent for decades but is now retired. During his tenure he was a driving force behind the continued development of the occam-π language as well as the JCSP process-oriented programming library for Java. Furthermore, he has been, and continues to be, the chairman of WOTUG, the organization behind this conference. Dr. Pedersen is an associate professor at the University of Nevada specialising in languages, compilers and parallel and process-oriented programming. He is the developer of the ProcessJ process-oriented language.

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. One workshop on domain-specific concurrency skeletons was also given. Furthermore, eight fringe presentations were given over two evening sessions these sessions are used for reporting on new ideas, work in progress or simply interesting thoughts associated with concurrency.

The workshop position papers and fringe abstracts are included in these Proceedings. Altogether, contributions came from nine different countries: Denmark, United Kingdom, Germany, United States, Spain, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Malta, and Norway.

This year saw a new version of the conference webpage, namely, http://cpaconf.org, where papers and resources will be available.

We would like to thank everyone who submitted papers, the reviewers for all their hard work, the editors for working with the authors to make all papers as good as possibly as well as all the delegates attending. Finally, a thank you to Kevin Vella from the University of Malta for putting together and hosting the conference in sunny Malta. Thank you all very much.

Jan Bækgaard Pedersen (University of Nevada Las Vegas),

Kevin Chalmers (Edinburgh Napier University),

Jan F. Broenink (University of Twente),

Brian Vinter (University of Copenhagen),

Kevin Vella (University of Malta),

Peter H. Welch (University of Kent).

Preface CPA 2018

Communicating Process Architectures (CPA) 2018 is the fortieth in the WoTUG series of conferences and took place from Sunday August 19th to Wednesday August 22nd 2018, hosted by the Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany. This sees the first visit to Germany for this conference. The conference was hosted by Professor Dr. Rainer Spallek, chair of VLSI Design, Diagnostics and Architecture at the Faculty of Computer Science, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Christian Mayr from the VLSI-Systems and Neuromorphic Circuits group, also at the Technische Universität Dresden gave this years keynote. The talk was titled: “SpiNNaker-2: a 10 Million Core Processor System for Machine Learning and Brain Simulation”, and describes the development of the SpiNNaker-2 processor platform. The SpiNNaker-2 system combines highly efficient machine learning, bio-inspired signal processing at millisecond latency and ultra-low energy operation. Professor Mayr has been at TUD since August 2015, and before this, he completed a post doc at ETH in Zürich, Switzerland. His Ph.D. was granted by Technische Universität Dresden in 2008.

Eighteen 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. In addition, a workshop on translating CSP-based languages to common programming languages was given. Papers were received from Norway, Denmark, United Kingdom, United States, the Netherlands, South Africa, France, and Germany. 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 four 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 always present faculty secretaries plus conference officer Oliver Knodel who made it work. A special thank you goes to Uwe Mielke, our local contact in Dresden, who, not only proposed the conference, but also did all the hard work arranging it with TUD as well as many preparations and more. Thank you all very much.

Jan Bækgaard Pedersen (University of Nevada Las Vegas).

Kevin Chalmers (Edinburgh Napier University).

Marc L. Smith (Vassar College).

Kenneth Skovhede (University of Copenhagen).

Brian Vinter (University of Copenhagen).

Peter H. Welch (University of Kent).

Rainer Spallek (Technische Universität Dresden).