This special issue of Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience is devoted to a selection of papers presented at the 10th International Workshop on Compilers for Parallel Computers (CPC 2003), held in Amsterdam, 8-10 January 2003. During this workshop, a total of 36 papers were presented and eight of these were selected for this special issue. The goal of CPC is to bring together researchers in the compiler area in an informal atmosphere to discuss their current research and to foster collaboration. CPC was first organized in Oxford, U.K. in 1989. During that time, the workshop was focused on high-performance computing issues, such as data distribution, high-performance Fortran (HPF) and other parallel Fortran dialects, automatic parallelization, sparse matrix computations, etc. In most, if not all, of the papers Fortran was used as the source language. This remained the case for the next couple of workshops, held in Paris (1990) and Vienna (1992). To give a flavor of the changing focus of CPC, in Delft (1993) 38% of the papers dealt with HPF or some related parallel Fortran dialect. In Malaga (1995) 31% of papers did so, in Aachen (1996) 30%, in LinkΓΆping (1998) 19%, in Aussois (2000) 11%, in Edinburgh (2001) 8%, and in Amsterdam (2003) only 2%. At the same time, we have witnessed a steady increase in papers that deal with Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW), Java, Integer Linear Programming (ILP) scheduling issues, embedded systems, etc. It is safe to say that CPC is a continuously changing and adapting workshop and continues to provide a forum for present-day research.
The program of the 2003 installment reflects the diverse research topics in compiler construction, ranging from 'classical' parallelizing compilers and program analysis to optimizations specific for embedded systems, performance analysis for large-scale applications and systems to automatic code generation from high-level mathematical specifications, and so on. This diversity reflects the central role the compiler is playing in the present-day computer arena. Modern systems, be they largescale supercomputers or embedded systems, require cutting-edge compiler technology for them to be efficiently programmable.
The first paper in this special issue is authored by Yoshida and proposes an overlapping task assignment scheme for hierarchical coarse-grain parallel processing. This paper can be seen as a 'classical' paper on high-performance computing.