A graphical system for parallel software development

Abstract

Parallel architectures have become popular in the race to meet an increasing demand for computational power. While the benefits of parallel computing - the performance improvements due to simultaneous computations - are clear, achieving these benefits has proved difficult. The wide variety of parallel architectures has led to a similarly diverse range of parallel languages and methods for parallel programming, many of which feature complicated architecture-specific language mechanisms. The lack of good tools to assist in the development of parallel software has compounded the problem of parallel programming being limited to a field which is both specialist and fragmented. This thesis investigates techniques for the graphical specification of parallel programs, using an architecture-independent graph-based notation representing the design of the program, combined with conventional sequential languages. Automatic code generation is used to translate the graph program into executable code suitable for different parallel architectures. To overcome the differing performance characteristics of parallel architectures, methods for the graphical adjustment of granularity are proposed and investigated, and an encompassing parallel design environment is presented.