An object-oriented approach to structured parallel programming

Several kinds of parallel applications tend to employ regular patterns for communication between and internally to their components. Once the most commonly used patterns-such as pipelines, farms and trees-are identified (both in terms of their components and their communication), an environment can make them available as high-level abstractions to use in writing applications. This can lead to a structured style of parallel programming. The paper shows how this structured approach can be accommodated within an abject-oriented environment: on the one hand, a class library provides the patterns; on the other hand, programmers can define new patterns by exploiting inheritance. Several examples illustrate the approach and show that it can improve the usability of a parallel programming environment without sacrificing efficiency.