Communicating Process Architectures 2000

Book excerpt: Modern computing systems are built in terms of components and those components communicating. Communication systems imply concurrency, which is a theme of the WoTUG series. Traditionally concurrency has been taught, considered and experienced as an advanced and difficult topic. The thesis underlying this conference is that that idea is wrong. The natural world operates through continuous interaction of massive numbers of autonomous agents at all levels (sub-atomic, human, astronomic). It seems it is time to mature concurrency into a core engineering discipline that can be used on an everyday basis to simplify problem solutions, as well as to enable them. The goal of Communicating Process Architectures 2000 was to stimulate discussion and ideas as to the role concurrency should play in future generations of scalable computer infrastructure and applications - where scaling means the ability to ramp up functionality (stay in control as complexitiy increases) as well as physical metrics (such as performance).