The TOPSYS architecture

Abstract

A survey on the TOPSYS (TOols for Parallel SYStems) project at the Department of Computer Science at Technical University of Munich is presented. Within this project, an integrated tool environment for increasing programmer productivity when using and programming parallel computers is developed.The TOPSYS tool environment offers tools for specification, mapping, debugging, testing, performance analysis, graphical program animation and dynamic loadbalancing of parallel programs. In addition to these tools a distributed operating system kernel and a synthetic workload generator has been developed. Apart from the integrated hierarchical architecture, the major features of the TOPSYS environment are the support of different monitoring techniques, easy adaptability, high portability and a common graphic user interface for all tools. After the description of the project goals, the major design concepts and the state of the project we describe a first application of the TOPSYS tools.