Adding parallelism to visual data flow programs

  • Authors:
  • Philip Cox;Simon Gauvin;Andrew Rau-Chaplin

  • Affiliations:
  • -;Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada;-

  • Venue:
  • SoftVis '05 Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Software visualization
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Programming in parallel is an error-prone and complex task compounded by the lack of tool support for both programming and debugging. Recent advances in compiler-directed shared memory APIs, such as OpenMP, have made shared-memory parallelism more widely accessible for users of traditional procedural languages: however, the mechanisms provided are difficult to use and error-prone. This paper examines the use of visual notations for data flow programming to enable the creation of shared memory parallel programs. We present a model, arising from research on the ReactoGraph visual programming language, that allows code in a general class of visual data flow languages to be parallelized using visual annotations, and discuss the advantages this has over current textual methods.