The Cowichan problems are a suite of simple `toy' applications devised
to assess the usability of parallel programming systems.
The paper ``Assessing and Comparing the Usability of Parallel Programming Systems'' by Gregory V. Wilson, R. Bruce Irvin and Anil Sukul discusses the question of why so many parallel programming systems have been developed and why most of them are used so little. The authors propose a set of simple programming problems, called the Cowichan Problems, which can be used to compare the usability of parallel programming systems.
A sequential implementation of the problems has been developed and is described in the document ``The ANSI C Implementation of the Cowichan Problems'' by Gregory V Wilson. A marr @dcs.ed.ac.uk) and Fred Howell (fwh @dcs.ed.ac.uk). A tar archive of the files is available.
Greg Wilson can be contacted by email at gvwilson@vnet.ibm.com, and the original ftp site can be found at the University of Toronto.