Multi-Dimensional Concerns in Parallel Program Design

Parallel programming is difficult, thus design patterns. Despite rapid advances in parallel hardware performance, the full potential of processing power is not being exploited in the community for one clear reason: difficulty of designing parallel software. Identifying tasks, designing parallel algorithm, and managing the balanced load among the processing units has been a daunting task for novice programmers, and even the experienced programmers are often trapped with design decisions that underachieve in potential peak performance. Over the last decade there have been several approaches in identifying common patterns that are repeatedly used in parallel software design process. Documentation of these “design patterns” helps the programmers by providing definition, solution and guidelines for common parallelization problems. Such patterns can take the form of templates in software tools, written paragraphs with detailed description, or even charts, diagrams and examples.