FAW: Graphical Specification Techniques for Parallel Programming

在编写大规模并行计算程序时，程序员必须指定大量的进程及其交互，有效地将其逻辑结构映射到不同的硬件结构，并在缺乏可重复性和一致的全局状态的情况下进行调试。这些活动中的一些可以由顺序工具的扩展来支持，但大多数需要开发专门针对并行性的新技术。目标体系结构的多样性、相对缺乏并行性的经验以及可用并行度和粒度的范围使这种开发变得更加具有挑战性。本研究的重点是对消息传递体系结构的支持。在资助期间，并行程序规范和调试工作将继续进行，并开始为连接机提供特定的编程支持。编程环境提供的抽象决定了程序员在实现和调试算法方面的效率，但很少有抽象支持大规模并行。基于图文法的编辑器有助于将并行程序简明、可扩展地描述为带注释的图族。然而，仅有规格是不够的。程序图形必须可用于环境中的其他工具，如调试器、动画师和映射器。这项工作将考察现有技术对设计局部可视化方法的适用性，并确定懒惰图生成的可行性和实用性。其目的是探索这些图形规范技术在连接机中的适应性。

When programming massively parallel computations, programmers must specify large numbers of processes and their interactions, efficiently map their logical structures onto disparate hardware structures, and debug in the absence of reproducibility and consistent global states. Some of these activities can be supported by extensions of sequential tools, but most require development of novel techniques specific to parallelism. This development is made even more challenging by the diversity of target architectures, the relative lack of experience with parallelism, and the range in degree and granularity of available parallelism. This research focuses on support for message-passing architectures. During the funding period, work will continue on parallel program specification and debugging, and begin on programming support specific to the Connection Machine. The abstractions provided by a programming environment determine a programmer's effectiveness in implementing and debugging algorithms, yet few abstractions support massive parallelism. A graph grammar- based editor can facilitate the concise, scalable specification of parallel programs as annotated graph families. Specification, however, is not enough. Program graphs must be available to other tools - such as debuggers, animators, and mappers - within the environment. This work will investigate the applicability of existing techniques, to design methods of partial visualization, and determine the feasibility and utility of lazy graph generation. It is intended to explore the adaptation of these graphical specification techniques for the Connection Machine.