ParaScope: A Parallel Programming Environment
The ParaScope project is developing an integrated collection of tools
to help scientific programmers implement correct and efficient
parallel programs. The centerpiece of this collection is the
ParaScope Editor: a new kind of interactive parallel programming tool
for developing scientific Fortran programs. It assists the
knowledgeable user by displaying the results of sophisticated program
analyses and by providing editing and a set of powerful interactive
transformations. After an edit or parallelism-enhancing
transformation, the ParaScope Editor incrementally updates both the
analyses and source quickly. In addition, the ParaScope Editor
supports general user editing through a hybrid text and structure
editing facility that incrementally analyzes the modified program for
potential hazards. The ParaScope Editor is a new kind of program
construction tool -- one that not only manages text, but also presents
the user with information about the correctness of the parallel
program under development. As such, it can support an exploratory
programming style in which users get immediate feedback on their
various strategies for parallelization.
It displays the results of sophisticated program analyses, provides a
set of powerful interactive transformations, and supports program
editing. We investigate the experiences of scientific programmers and
tool designers using the ParaScope Editor. We evaluate existing
features and describe enhancements in three key areas: user interface,
analysis, and transformation. Many existing features prove crucial to
successful program parallelization. They include interprocedural
array side-effect analysis and program and dependence view filtering.
Desirable additional functionality includes improved program
navigation based on performance estimation, incorporating user
assertions in analysis and more guidance in selecting transformations.
These results offer insights for the authors of a variety of
programming tools and parallelizing compilers.
Papers
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(Last changed: May 26, 1998.)