This proposal is the first phase in establishing a Parallel Applications and Software Laboratory that will be a component of the Indiana University Center for Innovative Computer Applications (CICA). This laboratory will build upon the resources of an established center to provide a facility where a staff of trained people will work directly with scientists from a variety of disciplines to design new parallel applications and to study the effectiveness of specialized tools for parallel programming, program restructuring and performance visualization. The research mission of the laboratory will be to use the domain of real world applications to study the problem of designing scalable parallel software. Our specific research projects for this laboratory are: (1) To apply and evaluate existing parallel programming tools to real applications in the physical and social sciences. (2) To investigate the utility of higher level, object oriented abstraction mechanisms in the design of parallel applications. In particular, we will use a new programming methodology based on object oriented design that will allow us to compile programs for a wide variety of massively parallel architectures. (3) To extend the state of the art in performance analysis tools so that they are able to predict performance as machine and problem sizes are scaled. This involves the design of a new generation of algorithm visualization tools that incorporates parallel complexity models and static and dynamic analysis of parallel programs with analytical models of machine behavior.
