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The 1996 CERN School of Computing is organised by CERN, in collaboration with ASCI and NIKHEF.
This year's School is a little different from usual. In recent years the programme has been structured into a number of important themes for modern computing systems. The first week of the school is devoted to themes of general relevance both inside and outside particle physics: the second explores a number of themes in more depth with particular reference to the current computing challenges facing the particle physics community.
In 1996, the first week of the school is being organised jointly with the ASCI organisation in the Netherlands. ASCI is an Inter-University Graduate Research School set up by Dutch Universities to coordinate research and training in the area of Computing and Imaging Systems. The first week of CSC'96 will, therefore, be combined with the ASCI Summer School.
The nineteenth CERN School of Computing will be held in in the Hotel Zuiderduin, situated near the sea in the village of Egmond aan Zee, from Sunday, 8 September, to Saturday, 21 September 1996.
The programme will be dedicated to the following themes:
The first three themes will be covered in week one with the participation of the ASCI students. There will be tutorial sessions during both weeks and the tutorial topic for week two will be ``Programming Web Applications in Java''.
The total number of lectures will be 41. Exercises and demonstrations will be a complement to these lectures.
Imaging systems, image processing and analysis, and image recognition and understanding have come a long way in the past 40 years. In the Imaging track of the 1996 CERN School of Computing, the modern developments will be stressed in six two-hour lectures. Starting from an introduction to 1) Modern Imaging Systems, followed by a presentation on 2) Image Filtering Techniques, advanced techniques will then be presented in a number of areas that are directly relevant to physics applications. The presentations will cover 3) Model-Based Image Analysis, 4) Coding Techniques for Image Compressions and Image Sequences, image recognition though 5) Neural Networks, and image representation and processing through 6) Scale Space Techniques. Associated with the lectures will be an extensive series of ``hands-on'' laboratory experiments that are to be performed by the participants.
Parallel and distributed computing is in a very tumultuous stage because of the ever increasing speed of processing and communication and size of memory and other storage devices. This has a large impact on the design and the use of parallel and distributed computing systems. In two series of three lectures the state of the art in hardware and software system development will be presented. One series will present the status of parallel machines and their applications, the other will put emphasis on the state of the art in distributed operating system technology.
This series of lectures will present the state-of-the art in networking technology, in particular recent advances in high-speed solutions including ATM. It will also present an overview of the major applications on the emerging information highways, with a particular emphasis on multimedia developments.
Designing and implementing distributed applications can be a daunting task, the developer has to deal with a number of difficult issues, concerning program complexity, concurrency and parallelism. Computer science researchers have been working to produce tools and methods to help the programmer with them: Operating Systems, Programming Languages and Formal Methods. We will give an account of these research efforts, and their practical outcomes, in three talks:
The emergence of Collaborative Engineering, illustrated by LHC problems, will be discussed, tools and strategies for cooperative work presented - the WWW, videoconferencing, sharing knowledge, etc. - Computer Aided Design and Product Data Management techniques and methods described. The realisation of the LHC machine and its experiments represents a great challenge and calls for the most advanced technical resources.
Applications of the concepts of visualisation and imaging to problems in High Energy Physics will be shown in four one-hour lectures. Visualisation of results of particle interactions and use of imaging techniques for fast selection in trigger processing will be addressed.
This theme picks out three interesting trends in the development of programming languages.
O-O methodology is becoming of increasing importance in the design and coding of significant software systems.
The use of distributed-memory multi-processor systems is important for the solution of large-scale scientific problems. HPF allows the programmer to dictate the placement of data to obtain high performance on such systems at the same time as maintaining a high level of abstraction.
The use of functional techniques applied to imperative language programming is a potentially important new development. This topic explores progress in this exciting new area.
The final part of this theme is the provision of tutorial laboratory sessions on programming WorldWideWeb applications with Java. Java has been adopted by all the major Internet applications developers and is likely to be of increasing importance in the next decade.
This year the CERN School of Computing will be combined with the Advanced School of Computing and Imaging (ASCI), and is open to post-graduate students and research workers with a few years' experience in elementary particle physics, in computing, imaging, or in related fields. The number of participants will be of the order of 110; about 70 participants will come from CERN or from laboratories closely associated with CERN (``non-ASCI'' students) and about 40 students from laboratories belonging to ASCI (``ASCI'' students). Most of the ASCI students will participate only in the first week of the School.
The working language of the School will be English. There will be no simultaneous translation. Participants should therefore have sufficient understanding of English to enable them to benefit from the School.
All details concerning application (registration, cost, cancellation, enquiries and correspondance) for both non-ASCI and ASCI students can be found on the Web.