The Pilot library is a new method for programming MPI-enabled clusters in C, targeted at novice parallel programmers. Formal elements from Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) are used to realize a process/channel model of parallel computation that reduces opportunities for deadlock and other communication errors. This simple model, plus an application programming inter-face (API) styled after C's formatted I/O, are designed to make the library easy to learn. The Pilot library exists as a thin layer on top of any standard Message Passing Interface (MPI) implementation, preserving MPI's portability and efficiency, with little per-formance overhead arising as result of Pilot's additional features.

The "Requirements to Design to Code" (R2D2C) project of NASA's Software Engineering Laboratory is based on inferring a formal specification, currently using Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP), from system requirements supplied in the form of scenarios, a user-friendly medium often used to describe the behavior of computer systems under development. The scenarios are first converted into an intermediate form, CSP traces, from which are derived CSP specifications. This work, called Mise en Scene, defines a new scenario medium (Scenario Notation Language, SNL) suitable for control-dominated systems, coupled with a two-stage process for automatic translation of scenarios to a new trace medium (Trace Notation Language, TNL) which encompasses CSP traces. A survey of the "scenario" concept and a small case study are also presented.