Overview of VPE: A Visual Environment for Message-Passing

VPE is a fully integrated visual heterogeneous parallel programming environment with a message-passing orientation. It is intended to provide a simple human interface to the process of creating message-passing programs. Programmers describe the process structure of a program by drawing a graph in which nodes represent processes and messages ow on arcs between nodes. They then annotate these computation nodes with program text expressed in C or Fortran which contains simple message-passing calls. The VPE environment can then automatically compile, execute, and animate the program, even on heterogeneous targets. VPE uses PVM as its initial implementation vehicle, but it is designed so as to support targeting other message-passing systems later. It's GUI provides direct user management of a heterogeneous collection of machines to be used as a virtual parallel machine.