ELGDF (Extended Large Grain Data Flow) is a design language that allows representation of a wide variety of parallel programs. The syntax is graphical and hierarchical to allow construction and viewing of realistically sized programs. ELGDF language facilitates describing parallel programs in a natural way for both shared memory model as well as message passing model. The syntax poses high level structures such as replicators, loops , pipes, branches, and fans, as well as constructs for shared resources. ELGDF resolves arc overloading in current graphical languages by using different symbols and different attributes for different types of arcs.
The ELGDF serves as the foundation of a parallel programming environment under development at Oregon State University. The complete syntax of ELGDF helps the program designers to deal with parallelism in the manner most natural to the problem at hand. It also helps as a way to capture parallel program designs for the purpose of analysis such as scheduling and performance estimating. Thus, the goal of ELGDF is two-fold: 1) a program design notation and computer-aided software engineering tool, and 2) a software description notation for use by automated schedulers and performance analyzers
