This chapter provides an overview of the Parallel Applications Development Environment (PADE). It describes the philosophy behind PADE, the basic aspects of its functionality, and how to access PADE on the Internet.
PADE is a flexible, customizable environment for developing parallel applications that use the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) message-passing library. It provides an integrated framework for all phases of development of a message-passing parallel application: editing, compilation, execution, and performance monitoring and enhancement. PADE is most useful with a heterogeneous virtual machine consisting of multiple architectures and/or multiple file systems. By automatically selecting only those files that have been modified since the last compilation, PADE can be used as a parallel make for a heterogeneous virtual machine. The PADE package consists of an intuitive graphical user interface, a suite of PVM utilities, and documentation in PostScript, ASCII, and HTML formats.