A visual programming system for the development of parallel software

Describes GILT, a visual programming language for transputer based multiprocessors, which is under development at City University. GILT programs take the form of hierarchical graphs in which nodes are processes visually represented by icons and edges are either control flow or interprocess communication paths. Users of GILT interactively build programs using a mouse at a high resolution workscreen. Only when a program has been completely specified in terms of communicating processes need the user enter conventional program text for the lowest level processes. GILT programs may then be compiled into occam for execution on transputer arrays. This approach to concurrent programming has a number of advantages, which include increased speed of interaction, a much higher information transfer bandwidth between man and machine, and a more natural representation of parallelism than is allowed by conventional textual languages