Design of parallel algorithms using discrete event simulation

Describes the transputer applications prototyping tool, Transim, and its graphical front end, Gecko. Transim is a simulation tool that reads an occam script with certain language extensions and produces information about the expected run-time performance. What makes Transim useful, however, is that the full code for the intended application is not required, Transim takes its input in the form of a control skeleton only, such as should be available early in the planning process. It is intended that the toolset is used early on in the software process as a kind of sketchpad, allowing ideas to be tested for performance more easily than fully coding and running them, yet more accurately than from back of the envelope calculations