Graphics-Based Parallel Programming Tools

Highly parallel architectures will be useful in meeting the demands of computationally intensive tasks only to the extent that it is possible to write efficient parallel software. The problems are enormous. The parallel programmer must simultaneously code for multiple processes, orchestrating their communication and synchronization he must efficiently map logical processes onto disparate hardware configurations and schedule their execution. Further, he must debug-both for correctness and performance - in spite of a potentially overwhelming amount of relevant information and in the absence of reproducibility or consistent global state. If it is not possible to provide sophisticated programming support for these activities, it is unlikely that highly parallel computation will be generally available to either the scientific or the commercial communities. In our research, we have investigated aspects of parallel computation that are specific to massive parallelism.