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This paper describes an X-window based sofiware environment called HeNCE (Heterogeneous Network Computing Environment) designed to assist scientists in developing parallel programs that run on a network of computers. HeNCE is built on top of a software package called P VM which supports process management and communication between a network of heterogeneous computers. HeNCE is based on a parallel programming paradigm where an application program can be described by a graph. Nodes of the graph represent subroutines and the arcs represent data dependencies. HeNCE is composed of integrated graphical tools for creating, compiling, executing, and analyzing HeNCE programs.

Writing parallel programs for distributed multiuser computing environments is a di cult task. The Distributed object migration environment (Dome) addresses three major issues of parallel computing in an architecture independent manner: ease of programming, dynamic load balancing, and fault tolerance. Dome programmers, with modest e ort, can write parallel programs that are automatically distributed over a heterogeneous network, dynamically load balanced as the program runs, and able to survive compute node and network failures. This paper provides the motivation for and an overview of Dome, including a preliminary performance evaluation of dynamic load balancing for distributed vectors. Dome programs are shorter and easier to write than the equivalent programs written with message passing primitives. The performance overhead of Dome is characterized, and it is shown that this overhead can be recouped by dynamic load balancing in imbalanced systems. Finally, we show that a parallel program can be made failure resilient through Dome's architecture independent checkpoint and restart mechanisms. Currently visiting CMU from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brasil, with support provided by CNPq.