Various problems, like the specification of distributed programs, their mapping to the hardware and the observation of running systems are the main reasons for this fact. The DesignTool contains a graphical editor which allows the hardware independent specification of process graphs. Each process is an independent, sequential task having access to local memory only.
Processes can communicate with each other by message passing constructs.
Furthermore, the design-tool allows the user to specify the configuration of the hardware system. The ConfigurationTool computes a mapping of the process graph onto the parallel architecture and generates the configuration languages. These languages are different for each parallel computer. Different tools allow the visualization of program execution. With the PerfTool it is possible to observe the hardware, i.e. load characteristics and scheduling information to improve the performance of the application.