Research Of Visual Modeling Language System And Support System For Parallel Applications

As the application of multi-core processors, much progress has been made on the development and application of high-performance parallel computers, but it also bring much more difficult challenges for the design and development techniques of parallel application programs and softwares due to their increasingly complex hareware architectures. To reduce the difficulty of the design and development of parallel application programs and enhance its development efficiency, research of visual modeling languages and support systems for parallel application programs are made and the following innovative achievements are gained based on the program modeling idea on the high-abstract and visual level.Firstly, a visual modeling language specification for the design of parallel programs and detailed definitions of its components including morpheme (or alphabet), syntax specification and semantics are proposed. The proposed specification provides a general representation method of morpheme, and syntax specification and semantics definition based on formal grammars. The kernel part of the modeling language is defined and designed, while a context-free grammar called positional grammar is applied to complete the formal definition and representation of the syntax to provide the strong theoretic support of the visual modeling language.An experiment is conducted to perform syntactic validation on FFT algorithmic model constructed by the modeling languge. The experiment results indicate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.Then, the support system of the visual modeling language is researched and a graphic-model-driven parallel program development scheme is proposed. According to the scheme, in the modeling phase a modeling supportive system is researched while a graphic model editing and a model validation method is proposed and applied in it; In the model transforming phase, a model transformation supportive system is researched while a method transforming graphic models to source codes is proposed and applied in it to provide the automation of the source-code-skeleton generation. A support system platform called ParDT is designed and implemented, including an implementation of a message passing library. Two case studys on the matrix multiplication and the SWLAG algorithm, respectively, are performed. And the corresponding results indicate that the support system can effectively reduce the difficulty in developing parallel programs in the precondition of assuring correctness of graphic models and generated source code skeletons.Finally, aiming at more complex multi-level hybrid parallel computing environment, a hierarchical idea of the parallel program modeling for the multi-level, hybrid parallel architecture is proposed and researched, and a general hierarchical modeling scheme is also designed, including the modeling specification on the proposed three layers called task allocation layer, task assignment layer, algorithmic implementation layer, respectively. A visual modeling system called e-ParaModel for the multi-level, hybrid parallel computing environment is designed and implemented. We conducted an example to demonstrate the process of the proposed modeling scheme and to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the scheme.