ParaPET A Parallel Programming Environment Toolkit P5404 GP MIMD

Introduction Parallel programming is in a state of flux. The choice of parallel programming paradigms and the presentation of concurrency to the applications programmer are still matters of intense research. Fortunately the cost of prototyping and experimenting with programming environments can be dramatically reduced using a low-level toolkit. Furthermore, standard low-level interfaces enable the rapid porting of higher-level code to new platforms. ParaPET, the Parallel Programming Environment Toolkit, has been developed to fulfill this role. It is based upon the lightweight communications infrastructure of the Virtual Channel Router[1] (VCR) package. The VCR system is readily available from the University of Southampton Parallel Application Centre and is distributed for a nominal cost to cover administration and media overheads 1 . VCR presents a distributed occam programming environment which dramatically simplifies the configuration of co