Patterns for Parallelism

There's no question that concurrency -- also known as parallelism -- is, or at least should be, in the forefront of all developer's and architect's field of vision. This is due in large part to the advent of multi-core processors.

To that end, Jorge L. Ortega-Arjona, a of the Mathematics Department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico has written a paper entitled A Functional Parallelism Architectural Pattern for Parallel Programming which will be presented at SugarLoafPLoP 2007, the Sixth Latin American Conference on Pattern languages of Programming later this month at Porto de Galinhas, Brazil.

According to the paper's abstract, the Parallel Hierarchies pattern is an architectural pattern for parallel programming used when the problem is understood in terms of functional parallelism. This pattern describes a solution in a layered hierarchical form, in which each layer is composed of two or more components that are able to simultaneously exist and perform the same operation.

While I'd much rather hear Prof. Ortega-Arjona's presentation in person, in between sessions on the beach, I'll have to settle to reading the paper online. It is interesting and practical, and worth the time.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 10:59 AM  Permalink