View-Oriented Parallel Programming

Traditional parallel programming styles have many problems which hinder the development of parallel applications. The message passing style can be too complex for many programmers. While shared memory based parallel programming is relatively easy, it requires programmers to guarantee there is no data race in programs. Data race conditions are generally difficult to debug and difficult to prevent as well. The View-Oriented Parallel Programming (VOPP) is a novel sharedmemory-based programming style. It removes the burden of checking data race conditions from the programmers. With the VOPP approach, shared data objects are divided into views according to the memory access pattern of the parallel algorithm. One advantage of VOPP is that programmers don’t need to worry about mutual exclusion, such as locks, since mutual exclusion is automatically done by the underlying system when a view is accessed. By removing data races from programs, VOPP makes it easier to code and less difficult to debug programs. It also provides potential performance advantages on multi-core systems as well as cluster computers.