An Architecture-Independent Software Development Approach for Parallel Processing Systems*

In th is paper, a n architecture-independent software de-velopment approach for parallel processing sy s t ems i s presented. T h i s approach is based o n the parallel object-oriented and func t ional computa t ion model PROOF and separates the architecture dependent issues f r o m soft-ware development. I t also facil i tates software develop-m e n t for any parallel processing sys tems by relieving the programmers f r o m the consideration of processor topol-ogy and var ious parallelization aspects of the software. O u r approach allows the exploitation. of parallelism at both levels of granularity: object level and method level, ihereby making our approach effective f o r software de-velopment f o r various MIMD computers. Software de-veloped using our approach will reflect the parallel struc-ture of t he problem. space which will make the software more understandable and modifiable. A f ramework con-sisting of object-oriented analysis, object-design, coding and t rans format ion phases i s presented f o r software de-velopment f o r parallel processing sys tems. An example is given t o i l lustrate th i s approach