Advanced Environments for Parallel and Distributed Applications: a View of Current Status

In this paper we provide a view of the design and development activity concerning advanced environments for parallel and distributed computing. We start from assessing the main issues driving this research track, in the areas of hardware and software technology and of applications. Then, we identify some key concepts, that can be considered as common guide lines and goals in the development of modern advanced enviroments and we come up with "classification" of these enviroments in two main classes: Programming Enviroments and Problem Solving Enviroments. Both classes are widely discussed, in light of the key concepts previously outlined, and several examples are provided, in order to give a picture of the current status and trends.