Avian Parallel Computing / News: Recent posts

ConcX 2.3 was released on 12-20 2017. This latest version of ConcX has a bunch of changes made to improve the cosmetics, performance, and reliabiltiy of the application. It can be run from its jar file or from the NetBeans IDE in either Windows or Linux. The biggest improvement was the addition of beaks which insulate the code from the location of the data resources, either the TupleTree or files in the file system. Selecting a food pod or a file automatically gets the correct type of beak loaded, which allows the code to make standard calls to retrieve food pods. The possible combinations of TupleTree and files, one food or two foods eaten, one or two foods stored, etc, resulted in more than 140 test conditions being successfully tested in this version.... read more

In a lovely bit of congruency, ConcX 2.2 has been released on 2-2 2017. This latest version of ConcX has a bunch of improvements, perhaps most importantly it has been jar-enabled. Up until this version, Bird and FoodPod verification was handled thru the file system, forcing one to run ConcX using the NetBeans IDE. While it's a lovely IDE, not everyone wants to use it. Plus, running only from NetBeans made trial installations a big, hairy deal. Version 2.2 solves that problem by making ConcX operating system aware (Linux & Windows) and run-time environment aware (IDE vs Jar) and letting ConcX make the appropriate adjustments internally so that the user interface is consistent across operating systems and run-time environments.... read more

Download "Getting Started with Avian Computing - Exploring Parallel Programming with ConcX" will be available for free download on this website and on aviancomputing.org. This PDF document introduces the concepts of Avian Computing and demonstrates how they are implented in the Concurrency Explorer (ConcX). Includes lots of examples of parallel programs that you load and run in ConcX, including Producer-Consumer, Dining Philosophers, Simulating the Effects of Greed, File Input/Output, parallel database access and more. ... read more

The latest version of the Concurrency Explorer (ConcX) is available. It offers a significantly improved user interface, ability to load and run more than 100 birds, ability to save flocks of birds to an XML file and then reload them, and lots more. Get the source code from the SourceForge Subversion repository for now - a zip file of the source code will be available as soon as I figure out how to upload it.

Version 1.0 of the Avian project is ready for general distribution. If you're interested in parallel programing in Java but you're tired of (or unsure of) the arcane exotica that goes along with it, try the Avian Parallel Computing project. It uses a nature-based model (flocks of birds) to make it easier to think and talk about parallel programs and encourages you to think about the partitioning the application into atomic tasks that can run in parallel (instead of worrying about locks and deadlocks).
It provides a GUI interface to start and stop birds (threads) and allows you to configure (and reconfigure) the birds as required. It also provides a parallel data-sharing framework based on Linda that simplifies the parallel programing processes. It makes coding the Dining Philosophers problem extremely simple. Real-time feedback on the activity of the birds, built in logging for each bird and each food object. It's all Java 6 code and was developed on NetBeans but we'll be moving to Java 7 right after JavaOne 2011.
It's a fun way to experiment with parallel programing.