Parallel Proto-a prototyping tool for analyzing and validating sequential and parallel processing software requirements

Parallel Proto is a software prototyping tool for analyzing and validating functional requirements which are targeted to either sequential, parallel or distributed architecture environments. Currently, most parallel processing computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools focus on the identification and simulation of parallelism during the coding stage of the software lifecycle. Such an approach does not take into account any explicit specification of parallelism inherent in the application or an associated parallel-oriented design. Using Parallel Proto, parallelism can be explicitly identified and modeled in the requirements and high level design stages of software development. The tool provides facilities for graphically constructing, data-flow-like software functional specifications and parallel and distributed hardware architectures, associating the software functions with the hardware components and interactively executing the functional prototype. Performance modeling statistics are available after prototype execution. Such capabilities support the early analysis of high level software and hardware architecture trade-offs