Visual object-oriented development of parallel applications

visual syntax. The developer is never forced into a parallelism-centric mode of operation. The developer’s paradigm is simply object-orientation, yet because of the nature of the programming language syntax, potential parallelism is trivial to extract automatically. Furthermore, since the parallel object-flow paradigm gains benefits from existing object-oriented technologies, it comes equipped with full lifecycle support as does any other object-oriented application. That is, to engineer software with parallel object-flow languages, it is only the implementation phase of the software lifecycle which is affected, while other activities such as analysis and design are not. 4. The Vorlon Programming Language Vorlon is a visual parallel programming language under development in the Department of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Vorlon adheres to the parallel object-flow model described above and is intended to be a first research vehicle exploring the utility of this model. Although the parallel object-flow paradigm is largely concerned with specifying parallel activity through user-level method graphs, graphs themselves are not enough to successfully build and execute parallel applications. For an actual language implementation two further layers of abstraction which insulate the developer from the underlying parallel system are required. These layers are necessary to provide both concurrency control features, and run-time resource management to the application. As such, the graphs which the user constructs are considered to reside at the top-level of the application architecture, supported by a concurrency control layer, which in turn is managed at run-time by a parallel run-time system. Vorlon Application Architecture M em or y M e m or y M e m or y M em or y C PU C P U C PU C PU ba ck pl an e bu s M e m or y C P U ba ck pl an e bu s M e m or y C PU ba ck pl an e b us M em o r y M em or y