Portable Parallel Programming Environments - the ESPRIT PPPE Project

There is a strong belief in the potential of large distributed memory parallel computers in the development of large scale scientific and engineering applications. However, several factors currently prevent the widespread uptake of these machines within an industrial and commercial context. Chief among these are the lack of integrated tool environments, lack of portability across parallel architectures, lack of migration aids, and lack of adherence to Open System standards.Under the auspices of the CEC ESPRIT 3 Initiative, European hardware manufacturers together with software houses and large industrial organisations have come together to form a consortium developing a fully integrated set of parallel programming tools. P P P E aims to produce a portable, parallel programming environment available across many high performance and parallel computers such that these systems become available for mainstream applications development.Very broadly there are two sides to the environment: offering run-time and the cross-development functionality. Each side has a portability layer upon which all the components are based: P C T E for the cross-development environment and PARMACS/MPI for the run-time environment. The initial tools being developed include a parallel debugger, a performance monitor and analyser and a H P F mapper and debugger.This paper will describe the P P P E programming environment and tools