• algorithmic skeletons
• code refactoring
• FastFlow
• parallel patterns
• structured parallelism

This thesis is about the development of RPL-Shell, a DSL-based tool aiming to facilitate the design process of structured parallel application development. The tool, written in C++ and intended to be delivered along with the parallel programming framework FastFlow, provides to the designer the possibility to explore a space of functionally equivalent, alternative parallel solutions for structured parallel applications. Starting from a simple parallel expression the user can generate a list of functionally equivalent expressions, change their non-functional parameters by hand or by applying optimizers, modify global environment variables and ask for approximate evaluations of performance measures. Finally the user can pick the "best" solution and eventually ask the shell to generate FastFlow code using a prototype compiler.