Open-ended programming environments

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Open-ended programming environments

Programming environments for parallel machines in use today are built on previous experience with sequential program development. They can be classified as:

Implicit parallel programming [25][6][16][1], where programmers develop sequential programs and compilers discover parallelism and create processes.
Explicit parallel programming, where programmers use sequential languages paired with a coordination language for process creation and management. The coordination language is either supported by the operating system and compiler [13][12][7], or is independent [5][9] and thus provides for parallel program portability.
Machine-dependent parallel programming, developed on processor arrays and heterogeneous networks, much like sequential programming was developed [3][20].

None of these parallel programming environments satisfies the essential condition for a true education in parallel computing: the development of the intuition for parallel programming as a distinct computational phenomenon. However, all of them could contribute to this intuition by allowing us to develop hands-on experience with the currently available machines. Programming environments for HPCS is a crucial topics for future software technology because a suitable environment provides for both research and education and may have good feedback on the technology itself. But we stress here that with a parallel programming environment many implicit activities in the conventional environments must be explicitly carried out and therefore the concept itself must be carefully designed. Building upon the conventional interactive environments, we can introduce a unifying concept of programming environment as a tuple

where

is a collection of objects (data and programs) used for program development and execution,

allows the programmer to express requests to the environment, and

maps

into streams of control on the underlying machine.