An Object-Oriented Approach to Structured Parallel Programming

In parallel programming, communication patterns are rarely arbitrary and unstructured. Instead, parallel applications tend to employ predetermined patterns of communication between their components. If 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 for use in writing applications. This can yield a structured approach toions for use in writing applications. This can yield a structured approach to parallel programming. The paper shows how this structured approach can be accommodated within an object-oriented language. A class library provides the most commonly used patterns and programmers can exploit inheritance to define new patterns. Several examples illustrate the approach and show that it can be efficiently