A Graphical system for Parallel Software Development
Year: 1998
Type: report
Abstract: Parallel architectures have become popular in the race to meet an increaing 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 side variety of parallel architectures has led to a similarly diverse range of parallel languages and methods for parallel programming, many of which feature complicated archituecture-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 represneting the design of the program, combined with conventaional 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, method s for the graphical adjustment of granularity are proposed and investigated, and an encompassing parallel design environment is presented.
Author: RS Allen
Language: English
Subfield: Hardware and Architecture
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1534758291