Towards visual development of message-passing programs

Abstract

Writing and managing programs for parallel systems is a difficult task. It is a great challenge for designers of visual programming languages to provide tools that will help in the process. This paper describes a new graph based tool called Visper that provides a multi-dimensional environment for program composition. Our approach combines different levels of abstraction at which parallel programs are expressed into a single Process Communication Graph (PCG). PCG visualizes program construction, debugging and performance tuning throughout the development cycle and thus maintains a single mental image for the developer. The paper addresses the issues of visual construction for parallel message-passing programs using a working tool Visper.