Distributed S-Net: High-level message passing 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 sketch out 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 and supercomputers. Three case studies illustrate how to use Distributed S-NET to implement different models of parallel execution, i.e. pipelined signal processing, client-server and domain decomposition. 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.