A visual environment for designing and simulating execution of processor arrays

NOVIS, a visual environment which supports the interactive development and animated simulation of special-purpose parallel architectures, is presented. NOVIS lets users design networks at an abstract level by placing processing elements into a connected grid of arbitrary (user-selected) shape. The environment's underlying philosophy of maximal information hiding makes intimate familiarity on the part of the user with the details of low-level issues (such as process schedule maintenance and event dispatching) unnecessary. Layout violations and exceptions detected during execution simulation (e.g., deadlock) are automatically reported to the user. An overview of NOVIS's features is followed by examples that show the environment's capabilities in a variety of useful applications.<>