Visual, object-oriented development of parallel applications

Parallelism is always going to be required to support the computational dem ands of some problem domains, and will continue to be exploited via 'tradit ional' parallel processing methods and languages. However, this paper argue s that parallelism will also become a requirement for the non-specialist us er, but that the traditional parallelism languages and techniques do not ha ve the right support for the engineering of large-scale, parallel applicati ons. The paper discusses this issue, and presents a visual, object-oriented parallel programming language, Vorlon, which addresses the management of b oth problem domain complexity and implementation complexity, to support the development of general-purpose parallel applications by programmers who ar e non-specialists in parallelism. (C) 2001 Academic Press.