Visual Programming and Parallel Computing

Visual programming languages have a number of advantages for parallel computing. They integrate well with programming environments and graphical program behavior visualization tools, and they present programmers with useful abstractions that aid them in understanding the large-scale structure of their programs. Such understanding is important for achieving good execution performance of parallel programs. Furthermore, graphical programming languages can be easier for non-specialists to use than other explicitly parallel languages since they relieve the programmer of the need to directly use low-level primitives such as message sends or locks. This paper discusses some of these general advantages and presents simple examples in the existing visual parallel programming languages, HeNCE and CODE 2.0. 1 Introduction It is widely believed that the use of parallel computation is limited by the difficulties associated with programming parallel machines. This fact limits non-specialists' acces..