PADE - The Parallel Applications Development Environment

Judy Devaney, Robert Lipman, Minwen Lo, William Mitchell, Mark Edwards, Charles Clark

National Institute of Standards and Technology
Gaithersburg, Maryland 20899

This talk and software demonstration will focus on the Parallel Applications Development Environment (PADE) developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. PADE is a flexible, customizable environment for developing parallel applications that use the PVM message-passing library. It provides an integrated framework for all phases of development of a message-passing application: editing, file transfer, compilation, execution, and performance monitoring and enhancement. The PADE package consists of an intuitive graphical user interface and a suite of PVM utilities.

The basic concept of PADE is to provide a development console for the virtual machine, that spans multiple file systems, so that all essential parallel development tasks can be carried out at a central location. This central location, the development host, is the computer where all source files for the parallel applications are kept and where PADE is executed. PADE allows the following tasks to be performed on the development host with transparent access to the other nodes of the virtual machine: (1) Defining the virtual machine; (2) Defining application source files; (3) Building the parallel application with a single command; and (4) Executing the application on the virtual machine.

The core of PADE is PVMmake, the utility that mediates all communications made by PADE between the development host and other nodes of the virtual machine. PVMmake is a PVM application which performs two basic operations: file transfer between hosts, and execution of shell commands (commands, scripts, programs) on remote hosts with the output piped back to the development host. A key feature of using PVMmake within PADE is the ability to transfer, to a remote host, only those files which have been modified since the last execution of PVMmake. This provides a capability similar to the make command in which only those files which have been most recently modified are recompiled.

Current information on PADE is maintained at http://physics.nist.gov/ResOpp/hpcc/pade.html