Parallel computation and control problems: A review

Computers and computer-aided technologies at present have a great impact on the progress of science and technology and social significance of scientific and technological decisions. Computer industry has created a global information environment, which is increasingly manifesting itself as a qualitatively new system-forming factor. New scientific problems in the development of this environment and elaboration of science-intensive methods and technologies for solving vital applied problems, axe not only global, but also interdisciplinary topics. Deep knowledge in individual scientific trends and skill to construct a synthetic solution uniting the well-known solutions of a large number of diverse disciplines are often pivotal in real problems. That science-intensive decision making technologies for vital applied problems can be formed only through the integration of various scientific trends is attracting the general attention. Realization of this idea is, most probably, a topical problem for the Russian Academy of Sciences. In fact, world science is entering a new phase of interdisciplinary integration, whose apparatus consists a unified versatile information medium and computer-aided technologies. But a unified universal instrumental apparatus is only a bare necessity. Formation of interdisciplinary technologies requires sophisticated science-intensive methods, which can be realized only through the formulation and solution of a large number of computation problems, i.e., via parallel computations. For discussing methods and technologies of parallel computation, identification, modeling, and control, a conference "Parallel Computation and Control Problems" was held on October 2-4, 2001, in Moscow under auspices of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (project no. 01-01-95). In this paper, we review the papers submitted at this conference. The review is based on [1], which gives the full texts of 114 reports.