Distributed S-Net: High-Level Message Passing without the Hassle

S-N ET is a declarative coordination language and component technology primarily aimed at modern multi-core/many-core chip architectures. It builds on the concept of stream processing to structure dynamically evolving networks of communicating asynchronous components, which themselves are implemented using a conventional language suitable for the application domain. We sketch out the design and implementation of Distributed S-N ET, a conservative extension of S-N ET aimed at distributed memory architectures ranging from many-core chip architectures with hierarchical memory organisations to more traditional clusters of workstations and supercomputers. Three case studies illustrate how to use Distributed S-N ET to implement different models of parallel execution, i.e. pipelined signal processing, client-server and domain decomposition. Runtimes obtained on a workstation cluster demonstrate how Distributed S-N ET allows programmers with little or no background in parallel programming to make effective use of distributed memory architectures with minimal programming effort