The D Editor: a new interactive parallel programming tool

Fortran D and High Performance Fortran are languages designed to support efficient data-parallel programming on a variety of parallel architectures. The goal of the D Editor is to provide a tool that allows scientists to use these languages efficiently. The D Editor combines analyses for shared memory machines and compiler optimizations for distributed memory machines. By cooperating with the underlying compiler, it can provide novel information on partitioning, parallelism, and communication based on compile time analysis at the level of the original Fortran program. The D Editor uses color coding and a collection of graphical displays to help the user to zoom in on portions of the program containing sequentialized code or expensive communication. The prototype implementation is useful for interactively displaying the results of compile time analysis; however, it has a number of shortcomings that must be addressed. Future enhancements will provide additional advice and transformation capabilities. We believe the D Editor is representative of a new generation of tools that will be needed to assist scientists to fully exploit languages such as High Performance Fortran