Problem-solving environments for parallel computers

Man-machine interaction can take place at different levels of abstraction ranging from the machine-instruction level to the problem-specification level. A problem-solving environment should provide restructuring and debugging tools to make the interaction at these different levels possible and to allow the efficient use of the target machine. Restructurers translate from specifications to programs or from programs to more efficient versions. When the target machine is parallel, the restructurers should include techniques for the automatic exploitation of parallelism. Debuggers are necessary to test for correctness and to evaluate performance at the different levels. Debuggers for parallel programs have to deal with the possibility of nondeterminacy.