COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE

BY BRUCE G. BUCHANAN
Department of Computer Science
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, Pa.

" The Charlotte distributed operating system is a test bed for the development of techniques for exploiting large-grain parallelism. It runs on a collection of 20 VAX-I 11750 computers. A recent paper gives conclusions drawn from several years’ experience with the system.

R.A. Finkel, M.L. Scott, Y. Artsy, H.-Y Chang, “Experience with Charlotte: Simplicity and function in a distributed operating system,” IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 15, 676-85, June 1989. (University of Kentucky, Lexington; University of Rochester, N.Y; Digital Equipment Corp., Littleton, Mass.; IBM Corp., T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, N.Y.)

" Cartesian geometry is inadequate for representing direction and orientation information. In computer graphics, Euler angles are used, to. translate images through several rotations, but the result is dependent on the order. Researchers recently have described the use of quaternions (discovered...

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