Software Engineering Considerations in the Construction of Parallel Programs*

In many papers describing parallel programming tools, the authors illustrate the strengths of their approach by presenting some impressive speedup results. However, is this the only metric by which we should judge the quality of their tool? Many of these tools offer significant software engineering advantages that reduce program development time and increase code reliability. This paper uses the Enterprise programming environment for coarse-grained parallel applications to illustrate the advantages of these tools. For most users, high performance is not an important evaluation criteria; other criteria, such as tool usability and program development savings, are often far more important.