Developing Interactive Parallel Programs
              on IBM SP-1 within AVS Framework

       Gang Cheng, Kim Mills, Marek Podgorny and Geoffrey Fox

              Northeast Parallel Architectures Center
              at Syracuse University
              111 College Place, Syracuse, NY 13244-4100

	  	    Tel: (315) 443-2083
		    Fax: (315) 443-1973
		    Email: gcheng@npac.syr.edu


	                    ABSTRACT

During the past two years, NPAC(Northeast Parallel Architectures
Center) at Syracuse University has actively engaged in
the research of software integration methodologies and environments
on massively parallel computers and heterogeneous distributed systems.
We use AVS as a system integrating tool in several research and
application projects which require interactive data visualization and
high performance computing and communication. We have successfully 
developed real-time parallel numerical simulation/modeling applications 
in AVS on several parallel systems, including Thinking Machines Connection 
Machine 2 and 5, Maspar's DECmpp-12000 and networked heterogeneous 
workstation clusters. We use AVS to combine sequential, 
data parallel, and message passing modules in a heterogenous 
environment. Our latest work is on the SP-1, 
IBM's newest parallel distributed-memory computer designed using 
powerful RISC technology combined with a high-speed switch. In this 
paper, we report initial work in developing interactive parallel 
programs on an IBM SP-1 within AVS to allow real-time control 
of modeling system and dynamically steering of model parameters 
We use a stock option price modeling application as a case study, 
and a portable message passing interface PVM(Parallel Virtual Machine) 
as the parallel programming environment on an Ethernet-connected 
SP-1. We focus our discussion on programming integration issues 
when porting parallel programs to the SP-1 within an AVS data-flow 
integration model. We also discuss integration with other non-portable 
programming environments on the switch-connected SP-1.