A Practical Development Process for Parallel Large-Scale Applications and its underlying Formal Framework

The development of parallel large-scale application codes is a challenging problem, because it requires a combination of application knowledge, understanding of the various aspects of parallelism involved, and software engineering. Moreover, the size of largescale applications usually is input-dependent, and the parallel algorithm needs to be scalable to various numbers of processors. This paper combines the theoretical as well as the practical aspects required for the understanding, realisation, and manageability of the development process of parallel large-scale applications. It provides a formal framework in which their (partly machine-model specific) potential parallelism can be expressed and requirements on scheduling and implementation are given. The paper further describes a practical software-engineering development approach build on this framework, and discusses and illustrates its usage in two large case studies. 1 INTRODUCTION Current research on parallel software developme..