A status report on VisPar: a visual tool for designing parallel programs

We describe VisPar - a visual tool intended to support the programmer in the process of designing complex parallel applications. The novel features of the tool are: support for both task and data parallelism and a mixture of the two; extensive use of analytical cost models for performance prediction; systematic program design by applying optimizing transformations; and visualization of the design process. We demonstrate the use of VisPar on a relevant case study - the practically important Jpeg compression algorithm $and report on the current status of the tool implementation.