Distributed S-Net: Cluster and Grid Computing without the Hassle

S-Net is a declarative coordination language and component technology primarily aimed at modern multi-core/many-core chip architectures. It builds on the concept of stream processing to structure dynamically evolving networks of communicating asynchronous components, which themselves are implemented using a conventional language suitable for the application domain. We present the design and implementation of Distributed S-Net, a conservative extension of S-Net aimed at distributed memory architectures ranging from many-core chip architectures with hierarchical memory organisations to more traditional clusters of workstations, supercomputers and grids. Three case studies illustrate how to use Distributed S-Net to implement different models of parallel execution. Runtimes obtained on a workstation cluster demonstrate how Distributed S-Net allows programmers with little or no background in parallel programming to make effective use of distributed memory architectures with minimal programming effort.