: An Environment for the Design and Performance Evaluation of Portable Parallel Software

Abstract

This paper describes the architecture of a development environment for computer-aided parallel software engineering. The environment comprises tools for program design, simulation, and visualisation. The toolset supports an interactive, performance-oriented software development life-cycle, and the user interface makes extensive use of graphics and animation. 1 Introduction The recent rapid growth of parallel cluster computing has signalled the urgent need for tools to support a parallel program design life-cycle. Concurrent programs are certainly no less complex than serial ones, but whereas serial programmers can rely on a simple and stable programming model (the von Neumann machine), parallel programmers must cope with two additional issues: platform configuration; and mapping (of the concurrent program onto the parallel platform). In high-performance computing, many assumptions made by serial software engineers no longer hold. For example, in serial life-cycle models, performance e..