A Pattern-based Refactoring Approach for Multi-core System Design

Until recently, the most software development tools and techniques were concentrated on views from the sequential model of program execution. Software developers who only familiarize with the sequential model will face unusual challenges of software projects that require multi-core or parallel programming. In this paper, we addresses the challenges that developers face as their projects requiring multi-core or parallel programming by applying design patterns. In general, design patterns are usually regarded as the role of quality-improver for improving software quality, but they could be the role of design-facilitator for facilitating design activities. To address this issue, we propose an approach for specifying the applicable contexts and refactoring steps of patterns systematically, as well as automating the refactoring process for lightening the burden of developers. We also extract a multi-core pattern ParallelWhile which is derived from the template class parallel_while of Intel ® TBB library to introduce our approach. Furthermore, we demonstrate our approach by a real-world multicore embedded system PVE (Parallel Video Encoder), where Command Pipeline pattern is designed for the design enhancement and platform migration. It aids developers identifying operations which could be parallel processing, and revising a sequential design as an Intel ® TBB parallel structure. In addition, our approach can promote the extensibility of parallel operations.