Thinking about ICFP'98 programming contest...

[Norman Davis <ndavis@ti.com>]

[French]
Excuse moi, je ne parle pas Francais.
(I hope the above translates into "Excuse me please, I don't speak French")

[English]

I've been thinking about the ICFP'98 programming contest which will be judged
on a "four-processor 150MHz Pentium-Pro box with 128 mbytes of memory running
Linux SMP". I'm wondering if anyone can tell me:

1) Do I need to do anything in particular or organize my program in a certain
way for me to take advantage of the multiple processors? Do I need to seperate
my program into multiple threads or processes? Are there any special calls I
must invoke or libraries I must utilize.

2) Beyond that, what do I need to do to take advantage of parallelism. 
Here is a quote from the web site : http://www.ai.mit.edu/extra/icfp-contest/

>On Thursday, August 27, 1998, a challenge task will be posted
>on the Internet. Teams will have 72 hours to implement a
>program to perform this task and submit this program to the 
>contest judges. The judges will perform a competition among 
>the submitted programs on a four-processor 150MHz Pentium-Pro 
> box with 128 mbytes of memory running Linux SMP. 

>Although the precise task chosen will not be revealed until
>the contest begins, performance matters. Algorithm 
>cleverness matters. We have specifically chosen a parallel 
>machine for the contest so that programs may exploit 
>parallelism. Programming languages that help programmers 
>to rapidly construct complex systems may allow contestants 
>to attempt particularly sophisticated implementations in 
>the 72 hours allotted for programming. 

Thanks.

  Norman Davis
  ndavis@ti.com