PARALLEL APPLICATION DESIGN - THE SIMULATION APPROACH WITH HASTE

It is important for the development of an industrial parallel applicat ion to have estimates of the execution time and cycle time of the appl ication from early stages of its conception. This paper presents HASTE , a tool built to simulate the behavior of an application in its desig n form, in terms of real time predictions for a particular target mach ine (transputers in the current version). HASTE (HAmlet Simulator Tool (E)) is a discrete event simulator implemented by a linkable library for programs written in parallel C. The modelling of the application d esign is based on functions for synchronization, communication and pro cess creation. An event trace is generated for the analysis of the sim ulated execution. A version of HASTE has been provided to the parallel application developers of the HAMLET project. They have been using it for a few months and have provided some feedback which is used to dev elop the next version of the simulator.