Topic 1: Support tools and environments

Abstract

The spread of systems that provide parallelism either "in-the- large" (grid infrastr-uctures, clusters) or "in-the-small" (multi -core chips), creates new opportunities for exploiting parallelism in a wider spectrum of application domains. However, the increasing complexity of parallel and distributed platforms renders the programming, the use, and the management of these systems a costly endeavor that requires advanced expertise and skills. Therefore, there is an increasing need for powerful support tools and environments that will help end-users, application programmers, software engineers and system administrators to manage the increasing complexity of parallel and distributed platforms. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.