A constructive development environment for parallel and distributed programs

Regis is a programming environment aimed at supporting the development and execution of parallel and distributed programs. It embodies a constructive approach to the development of programs based on separating program structure from communication and computation. The emphasis is on constructing programs from multiple parallel computational components which cooperate to achieve the overall goal. The environment is designed to easily accommodate multiple communication mechanisms and primitives. Both the computational and communication elements of Regis programs are programmed in the Object Oriented programming language C++. The elements are combined into parallel and distributed programs using the configuration language Darwin. The paper describes programming in Regis through a set of small example programs.