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.)