An architecture-independent software development approach for parallel processing systems

An architecture-independent software development approach for parallel processing systems is presented. This approach is based on the parallel object oriented and functional computation model PROOF and separates the architecture dependent issues from software development. It also facilitates software development for any parallel processing systems by relieving the programmers from the consideration of processor topology and various parallelization aspects of the software. Our approach allows the exploitation of parallelism at both levels of granularity: object level and method level, thereby making our approach effective for software development for various MIMD computers. Software developed using our approach reflects the parallel structure of the problem space which makes the software more understandable and modifiable. A framework consisting of object-oriented analysis, object-design, coding and transformation phases is presented for software development for parallel processing systems. An example is given to illustrate this approach.