Visual parallel programming with Visper

Although the processing power and cost-performance benefits of parallel systems are attractive, it is widely accepted that current methods of writing programs for these computers are inadequate. The reason is that the higher the abstraction to describe complications, the more difficult it gets to present parallelism, communication and synchronization. This paper describes a new tool, Visper for development of parallel programs. It provides an environment that graphically correlates the control and data flow aspects, in a process communication graph (PCG), without a need for complex textual annotation. It can also express static and run-time communication and replication structures. Our approach is based upon combining the levels of abstraction at which parallel programs are expressed and moving to compositional programming. Ready access to these abstractions is provided by a flexible graphical user interface. In Visper, both ease of preparation and compilation of graphical information to textual code are enabled