17.1.1 The Beginning

The software system described here-MOVIE (Multitasking Object-oriented Visual Interactive Environment)-is  the most sophisticated developed by CP. Indeed, it is sufficiently complicated that the project led by Wojtek Furmanski didn't finish the first prototype until two years after the end of CP and Furmanski's move to Syracuse. MOVIE is designed to address the general compound problem class introduced in Section 3.6 and illustrated in Chapter 18. Sections 17.3 and 17.2.10 describe current and potential MOVIE applications, and so provide an interesting discussion of many examples of this complex problem class. MOVIE is a new software system, integrating High Performance Computing (HPC) with the Open Systems standards for graphics and networking. The system was designed and prototyped by Furmanski at Caltech within the Caltech Concurrent Computation Program and it is currently in the advanced implementation stage at Northeast Parallel Architectures Center (NPAC), Syracuse University [Furmanski:93a]. The MOVIE System is structured as a multiserver network of interpreters of the high-level object-oriented programming language MovieScript. MovieScript derives from PostScript  and extends it in the C++ syntax-based, object-oriented, interpreted style towards high-performance computing, three-dimensional graphics, and general-purpose high-level communication protocol for distributed and MIMD-parallel computing. The present paper describes the overall design of the system with the focus on the HPC component and it discusses in more detail one current application (Terrain Map Understanding) and one planned application area (Virtual Reality).

The concept of the MOVIE System emerged in a series of computational experiments with various software models and hardware environments, performed by Furmanski during the last few years. His attitude was that of a computational scientist who tries to find the shortest path towards a functional (HPC) environment which would be both dynamic enough to fully utilize the hardware and software technology advances and stable enough to support reusable programming, resulting in extendible, backward-compatible and integrable application software.

MOVIE concepts derive from the computational science research within CP, such as optimal communication [Fox:88h] and load-balancing [Fox:88e] algorithms for loosely synchronous problems and, in the application sector, matrix algebra [Furmanski:88b], neural network  [Nelson:89a], and machine vision [Furmanski:88c] algorithms. As a next step, we started to develop the high-performance software environment for neural networks and machine vision and we realized that the full model in such areas must go beyond the regular HPC domain. New required components included dynamic interactive Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), support for irregular, dynamic computing which emerges, for example, in higher, AI-based layers of machine vision, and support for system integration in the heterogeneous computational model involving diverse components such as regular massively parallel image processing  and irregular, symbolic expert system techniques. This complex structure-a ``system of systems''-is typical of the compound problem class.

Furmanski's work decoupled therefore for some time from the main CP/NPAC thrust and, assuming tentatively that we ``understand'' the regular HPC components, he followed an independent exploratory route, making a series of computational experiments and identifying components of the ``next-step'' broader model for HPC, which would integrate all elements discussed above.