The GRED graphical editor for the GRADE parallel program development environment

In this paper, we describe a graphical editor GRED as a part of the integra ted programing environment GRADE that is intended to support designing, deb ugging and performance tuning of message-passing programs running on a hete rogeneous network of computers. The GRED editor hides the cumbersome detail s of the underlying low-level message-passing system (which can be either P VM or MPI) by providing visual abstractions but allows the programer to def ine local computations of the individual processes in C (or in Fortran in t he future) independently from the visually supported process management and inter-process communication activities. Visual representation of the critical (i.e. message-passing related) parts of the code can help the user in grasping the complex structure and run-tim e behavior of the whole parallel application, even if he or she is not an e xpert in the field of concurrent programing. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.