Graphical Parallel Program Editor

John Reese, CS 139c Project Proposal

Project title:

Graphical process topology design tool for mcc

Summary:

Much of the drudgery of designing parallel programs comes from the necessity of writing code to lay out the topology and connectedness of the nodes. I propose to create a graphical tool which will give one a graphical view of the topology of their program, allowing one to create processes, edit process code, and create connections between processes in a higher level manner.

Goals:

Only programs with static topology (number of nodes and connections) can be created.
A library based approach will be used: the code to control a given process will be saved in a single file, which should be reusable between projects. This should allow mixing and matching of common process types such as buffers, as well as more complex types.
It should be possible to write a completely functional program from within the tool.
The program will maintain mcc files, a Makefile, and any other necessary files (such as a text file specifying the topology) in a human-readable and modifiable format; it should be possible to load any program that follows a certain set of guidelines into the tool for editing.

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