P-RIO: a modular parallel-programming environment

To exploit parallelism, developers have based the software of many powerful multicomputer architectures on sequential pieces of computation that act concurrently and interact for communication and synchronization. In most message-passing-based programming environments, the interactions are specified through explicit language constructs embedded in the text of the program modules. Consequently, when the interaction patterns are not trivial, the overall program structure is concealed, making the structure difficult to recognize and complicating performance optimization. Also, these environments show little regard for properties of great concern in software engineering, such as reuse, modularity, and software maintenance. To address these issues, we designed the Parallel Reconfigurable Interconnectable Objects environment, which offers a graphical programming tool, modular construction, high portability, a separate configuration language, and runtime support mechanisms for parallel programs. P-RIO is, in principle, independent of the programming language, operating system, and communication architecture that the programmer adopts.