Parallel Application Development Environment (PADE)

Chris Ye and Mei See Yeoh

What is PADE?

What does PADE do?

• Provides a graphical user interface to keeping track of the application
• Enables visualization of various parts of the application across the virtual machine
• Simplifies routine administrative work.

Features of PADE

• Integrates available PVM tools into a single development environment.
• Manages files in a heterogenous virtual machine.
• Invokes, manages and monitors daemon processes on nodes of virtual machine.
• Accesses standard tools such as editors, debuggers and performance monitors.

System Requirements

• PVM version 3.0 or higher
• X-windows
• Tcl/Tk window environment

Development cycle in PADE

• Editing of source files.
  • Source files and configuration files can be written and edited in PADE.
  • All files are kept in the development host that PADE runs on.
• Transfering of sets of source files between nodes. Source files are transferred from the development host to the appropriate nodes.
• Compiling source files on each node.
• Executing the application.

What PADE does

• Edits source code appropriate to each node while retainint all source files in a central location on the development host
• Identifies nodes of the Virtual Machine by user input
• Invokes PVM daemons and sets up a PVM console for the virtual machine
• Maps files to appropriate nodes and specifies commands through user input
• Generates a specification file for pvmmake
• Calls pvmmake to build the parallel application
• Executes the application

Core parallel programming tools:

• PVMmake
• pvmstat
• pvmtidy

PVMmake

• is a parallel make utility written in PVM
• broadcasts files to any number of nodes in the virtual machine
• executes commands on anny nodes in the virtual machine

Advantages of using PADE

• Easy file managgement since all source files are kept in a central place
• Convenient edition, transfer, compilation and execution of files through a central control
• Incorporation of other parallel development tools
• Reuse of application configuration
• Convenient addition and deletioin of nodes from the virtual machine
• Clear graphic presentation which gives an overview of file relationships
• Generation of pvmmake configuration that can be used without PADE
• Good on-line help

Limitations of PADE

• Some common keyboard functions are missing from the graphical interface
• Certain executable code has to be stored in a fix directory
• Some menu options are not intuitive
• Bugs exist in PADE

Conclusion

• Useful for virtual machine consisting of a large number of nodes with multiplatform architectures

Reference