Extract of the original p4-reference manual:


   "... P4 is a library of macros and subroutines developed at Argonne
    National Laboratory for programming a variety of parallel machines. A
    paper describing its functions and use is [(ref
    butler-lusk:p4-paper)]. Its predecessor was the m4-based ``Argonne
    macros'' system described in the Holt, Rinehart, and Winston book
    Portable Programs for Parallel Processors, by Lusk, Overbeek, et al.,
    from which p4 takes its name[(ref lusk-overbeek:p4-book)]. The current
    p4 system maintains the same basic computational models described
    there (monitors for the shared-memory model, message-passing for the
    distributed-memory model, and support for combining the two models)
    while significantly increasing ease and flexibility of use.

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    You can obtain the complete distribution of p4 by anonymous ftp from
    info.mcs.anl.gov in the directory pub/p4. See the README file there
    for recent news on what is available. Take the file p4-1.4.tar.Z. The
    distribution contains all source code, installation instructions, this
    reference manual, and a collection of examples in both C and
    Fortran. Alog is included in the distribution with p4. The file
    upshot.tar.Z contains display facilities that can be used with p4 and
    other systems.
    
    To ask questions about p4, report bugs, contribute examples, etc., you
    can send mail to p4@mcs.anl.gov.
    
    The current release is version 1.4. You can check which version of the
    source code you have by looking at the file lib/p4_patchlevel.h in the
    distribution. You can check which version of the object code you have
    linked to by running any p4 program with the command-line option
    -p4version ..."

P4 was ported to the SBPRAM and optimized at the Department of
Computer Science at the University of Saarbrcken/Germany. To ask
questions about the p4 distribution for the SBPRAM, you can send mail
to bird@cs.uni-sb.de.
