Performance prototyping of parallel applications in N-MAP

The integration of performance engineering activities into the very early phases of the development process of parallel software is attacked with the development of a methodology and corresponding tools for performance prototyping. The authors have designed and implemented a fully integrated development environment for parallel software, the N-MAP toolset, with emphasis on the forecast of parallel program performance based on early prototypes. N-MAP provides language support for the rapid prototyping of programs exploiting data parallelism and/or parallelism at the task level. Further features/components of N-MAP are automated generation of instrumented source code for simulation and for execution on real parallel processors, trace analysis, performance visualization and execution animation, arbitrarily complex (deterministic and stochastic) workload specifications, fully automated scenario management, and a graphical user interface.