A system for simulating shared memory in heterogeneous distributed-memory networks with specializations for robotics applications

Hetero Helix is a programming environment which simulates shared memory on a heterogeneous network of distributed-memory computers. The machines in the network may vary with respect to their native operating systems and internal representation of numbers. Hetero Helix presents a simple shared memory programming model to developers, and considers the needs of designers, system integrators and maintainers. The key software technology in Hetero Helix is a compiler which automatically generates code for translating data representations from the format native to each machine into a common format and vice versa. The design of Hetero Helix was motivated by the requirements of robotics applications