Km. Decker et Bjn. Wylie, SOFTWARE TOOLS FOR SCALABLE MULTILEVEL APPLICATION ENGINEERING, The international journal of supercomputer applications and high performance computing, 11(3), 1997, pp. 236-250
Contemporary activities at CSCS/SCSC have resulted in two complementar
y software systems for practical parallel programming. Both developmen
ts are user oriented and application driven, efficiently exploiting an
d reusing demonstrated portable technologies at multiple levels that w
e have proven to scale to systems with large numbers of processors. Th
e Annai parallel application engineering environment supports existing
standards for portable program development (HPF, Fortran, C, MPI) and
offers convenient program browsing and navigation, execution control,
and interaction mechanisms. Specific functionality for parallel progr
amming includes high-level language support for unstructured computati
ons, interactive source-level symbolic debugging with deadlock detecti
on and deterministic execution replay, SPMD/data-parallel debugging wi
th distributed breakpoints and array visualization, scalable profile s
ummary displays of execution statistics accumulated at runtime, and de
tailed program evolution anti processor interaction charts. The intell
igent program development environment (PDE) is typified by four charac
teristics supporting programming at a very abstract level, closer to t
he scientist's perspective: application-oriented problem description f
ormalisms, the use of design skeletons and templates, an interactive u
ser guidance mechanism, and automatic program synthesis techniques. On
going work aims at the integration and further development of sofar de
monstrated results with additional advanced technologies into comprehe
nsive application engineering and problem-solving environments for pro
ductive parallel computing with distributed resources.