Hardware is visible and sexy, so all the excitement in the parallel processing world is generated by manufacturers, but it will be the companies that crack the problems of writing new applications and adapting existing ones to exploit the technology that will be best placed to make their fortunes out of the technology. One such hopeful is Pacific Software Corp in Mountain View, Caolifornia, which has just announced what it calls Paragram version 1.0, describing it as an innovative approach to parallel application development and program generation. Paragram is a software development tool designed to facilitate the modelling and development of parallel and distributed applications. Paragram is claimed to be able to generate an executable representation of the application when the application definition is complete. It offers a graphical user interface and uses a simplified data-flow diagramming technique to model the parallel interactions so that users can visualise the interaction of the various program elements intended to operate in parallel, and to reconfigure parallel programs to obtain optimal performance. It supports both multiple- and single-instruction architectures and is currently available on Motorola Inc 88100 RISC-based 88open-compliant systems; a Sparc version is nearly ready. The company gave no prices.
