Overview of VPE: A Visual Environment for Message-Passing Parallel Programming

This document introduces the VPE parallel programming environment as it was first conceived. VPE is a visual parallel programming environment for message-passing parallel computing and is intended to provide a simple human interface to the process of creating message-passing programs. Programmers describe the process structure of a program by drawing a graph in which nodes represent processes and messages flow on arcs between nodes. They then annotate these computation nodes with program text expressed in C or Fortran which contains simple message-passing calls. The VPE environment can then automatically compile, execute, and animate the program. VPE is designed to be implemented on top of standard message-passing libraries such as PVM and MPI.