Abstract

Engineers are constantly faced with solving problems of increasing complexity and detail. They frequently rely upon numerical methods to solve these problems, and their insatiable appetite for improved performance from computing hardware has reached a point where the computational requirements exceed reasonable expectations of the performance of Von-Neumann (serial) computers. Multiple Instruction stream Multiple Data stream (MIMD) computers have been devel-oped to overcome the performance limitations of serial computers. The hardware architec-tures of MIMD computers vary considerably and are much more sophisticated than serial computers. Developing large scale software for a variety of MIMD computers is difficult and expensive. There is a need to provide tools that facilitate programming these machines. The first part of this report examines the issues that must be considered to develop those tools. The two main areas of concern were architecture independence and data man-agement. Architecture independent software facilitates software portability and improves the longevity and utility of the software product. It provides some form of insurance for the

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