HPC the easy way: new technologies for high performance applications deployment

With the increase of both computing power available and computer application size and complexity, existing programming methodologies and technologies for parallel and distributed computing demonstrated their inadequacy. New techniques have therefore been designed and are currently being developed that aim at providing the user/programmer with higher level programming methodologies, environments and run time supports. In this work, we take into account some of these new technologies and we discuss their features, both positive and negative. Eventually, exploiting our experience in structured parallel programming environment design, we try to summarize which features have to be included in the programming environments of the near future, those answering (or trying to answer) the pressures and urgencies of current days claiming for new, efficient, easy to use high performance programming environments.