Visual Object-Oriented Development of Parallel Applications

Abstract

Developing software for parallel architectures is a notoriously difficult task, compounded further by the range of available parallel architectures. There has been little research effort invested in how to engineer parallel applications for more general problem domains than the traditional numerically intensive domain. This thesis addresses these issues. An object-oriented paradigm for the development of general-purpose parallel applications, with full lifecycle support, is proposed and investigated, and a visual programming language to support that paradigm is developed. This thesis presents experiences and results from experiments with this new model for parallel application development.