Creating portable and automatically scalable parallel software using the PARSA/spl trade/ programming methodology

We present a programming methodology that reduces parallel programming complexity, while creating portable and automatically scalable parallel software. To support this methodology two separate tools have been developed - the PARSA software development environment, and an accompanying thread manager. The development environment addresses programming issues via an object-based graphical programming methodology that transforms a project automatically into a portable and scalable source code. The generated source code makes calls to the user-level thread manager, which manages the run time execution of the parallel software. Two sample applications that contain various forms of parallelism have been developed and are compiled on three different systems with diverse native threading mechanisms to demonstrate portability. Finally, the automatic scalability is demonstrated with the run time performance of the applications on multiprocessor systems.