Using the Cowichan problems to assess the usability of Orca

The Cowichan problems are a suite of six applications for assessing the usability of parallel programming systems: the Turing ring, Kece, active chart parsing, image thinning and skeletonization, polygon overlay, and a skyline matrix solver. The authors and their colleagues implemented the applications in Orca, a parallel language based on shared objects. This experiment taught the authors useful lessons about Orca's parallel programming model, parallel efficiency, sequential language constructs, and programming environment. It can also give the designers of other parallel programming systems an idea of what to expect when using the Cowichan problems.