A Visual Programming Environment for the Navier-Stokes Computer

The Navier-Stokes Computer is a high-performance, reconfigurable, pipelined macliiiie designed to solve large coinputatioiial fluid dynamics problems. Due to the complexity of the architecture, development of effective high-level language compilers for the system appears to be a very difficult task. Consequently, a visual programming methodology has been developed wliicli allows users to program the system at an architectural level by constructing diagrams of the pipeline configuration. These schematic program representations can then be cliecked for validity and automatically translated into machine code. The visual environment is illustrated by using a prototype graphical editor to program an example problem. This work was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under NASA Contract No. NAS1Authors’ addresses: ICASE, M.S. 132C, NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA 23665. Electronic mail: 18107 while the authors were in residence at ICASE. sjtOicase.arpa, tomBicase.arpa, koala0icase.arpa.