SYSTEM FOR CONSTRUCTING AND DISTRIBUTING BLOCK-BASED FRAGMENTS

A distributed block-based programming model for control applications such as multimedia based real-time applications is described. According to one aspect of the invention, user program specifies interconnections between a plurality of program blocks distributed across a plurality of processing nodes. The user program is automatically translated into a system-level program having a program fragment for each one of the processing nodes. Each one of the program fragments comprise the program blocks located on the processing node and one or more system-level blocks for establishing connections between the processing node and a different processing node across a network.