An Environment For Parallel Scientific Computing: The Spade System And Its Functional Units

SPADE is an integrated system for application and program development on parallel architectures with distributed memory. Based on the fundamental philosophy to provide a framework for truly parallel problem solutions, it supports the application user in all phases of the life cycle of the application. SPADE is built on top of a collection of libraries which ensure its primary design goal, performance, while keeping architectural features completely transparent. Further design goals are simplicity, expandability and portability. This paper focuses on the description of the three functional units of the SPADE system, powerful application and program development environments and a run-time environment. 1 Introduction In the last thirty years, an impressive number of different hardware architectures have been developed which exploit parallelism on various levels. Particularly important in the last ten years became the class of multiprocessor pipeline vector computers with shared memory, w..