Parallel program design in visual environment

The great challenge in parallel computing is to make the task of programming parallel machines easy, while not sacrificing the efficiency of target code. One of the successful methodologies is to start from a high level specification of the functional behaviour of a program by applying a sequence of optimising transformations tuned for a particular architecture to generate a specification of the operational behaviour of a parallel program. We believe that visualisation is an excellent way to bring this methodology to a wider programming community. We describe an interactive visual system which integrates 3D graphics, animation, and direct manipulation techniques into a parallel programming environment.