A framework for visual parallel programming

One of the difficulties of parallel programming is the gap between the desire of programmers to describe computations with manageable abstractions and the detailed description of parallelism, communication and synchronization required by most parallel programming languages. Since in a parallel program, activities are distributed across both space and time, pictures are much more meaningful than text in program construction. This paper describes a new framework for visual parallel programming based on the concurrency map. Four levels of abstraction are provided in order to reduce the complexity of the construction and to allow fast exploration of different design alternatives. Moreover, the same diagrams that are constructed during the development of a program may also be used to display feedback from its execution. The flexibility of the framework is demonstrated by the implementation of a visual constructor for the occam programming language