PARSA: A Parallel Program Scheduling and Assessment Environment

Efficient partitioning and scheduling of parallel programs and the distribution of data among pmessing elements are very important issues in parallel and distributed systems. Existing tools fdl short in addressing the issues satisfactorily. On one hand, it is believed to k unreasonable to leave the burden of these complex tasks to the programmers. On the other hand, fully automated schedulers have ken shown to be d little practical significance, or suitable only for restricted cases. In this paper we address the issues and algorithms for efficient partitioning and scheduling d parallel programs, including the distribution of data, in dislributed-memory multiprocessor systems, using the PARSA parallel software development environment. PARSA consists of a set of visual, interactive, compiletime tools that will provide automated program partitions and schedules whenever possible, while permitting the user to exert conml over these operations for a htter performance. The support program assessment tool provides the users the opportunity b fine-tune the program and achieve their performance objectives.