Guest Editors' Introduction: Special Issue on Architecture-Independent Languages and Software Tools for Parallel Processing.

The article focuses on architecture-independent language and software tools for parallel processing. Parallel processing systems demonstrate their effectiveness as tools that deliver high-performance in solving complex problems. The concept of parallelism, either at the architecture or the algorithm level, is a significant departure from the traditional sequential approach. Languages and tools for parallel processing are designed to separate software development concerns from effective parallel execution concerns and provide both abstraction and standardization. To use parallel machines software, developers are required to first develop algorithms that are different than the ones they use on sequential machines and then to express their new algorithms using parallel languages or parallel extensions to existing languages. Parallel programming languages and environment should support the user in all phases of the parallel program development process.