Entry

Jan W. Amtrup (1995)

"ICE--Intarc Communication Environment: User's Guide and Reference Manual. Version 1.4."
Verbmobil Technical Document 14. Univ. of Hamburg.

[PDF, 69 pages]

Abstract

This version of the Technical Document covers version 1.5 Patch level 0 of ICE. Previous versions are no longer supported. Changes to the previous published version of the manual are indicated by margin bars. ICE is a communication mechanism for general AI projects. It was developed at the University of Hamburg to serve as the main cooperation means between modules in an architectural study for an advanced natural language interpreting system --- Verbmobil.

Besides being used for our local work, ICE has been chosen to be the communication environment for the Demonstrator and the research prototype of the Verbmobil project.

The Implementation is grounded on PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine), which is a system for communication between many processes in a heterogeneous network. On top of that we implemented an interface layer for several programming languages. It is modeled after a channel abstraction known from programming languages for parallel computers (e.g. Occam).

The goal of the implementation was to provide researchers with a simple-to-use and efficient environment for the development and testing of distributed AI-systems. Additionally we provide support for visualization by implementing an interface for Tcl/Tk, a now very en-vogue scripting language with graphics capabilities.