Revisit of View-Oriented Parallel Programming

Abstract

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 by using mutually exclusive locks. Data race conditions are generally difficult to debug and difficult to prevent as well. The view-oriented parallel programming (VOPP) is a novel shared-memory-based programming style. It removes the burden of guaranteeing data race free from the programmers. With the VOPP approach, shared data objects in a parallel program are divided into views according to the memory access pattern of the parallel algorithm. Data race is not an issue in VOPP, since mutual exclusion is automatically done by the underlying system when a view is accessed. The programmer only needs to synchronize the access of views using synchronization primitives like barriers. By removing data races of view access, VOPP makes it easier to code and less difficult to debug programs. It provides potential performance advantages on multi-core systems as well as cluster computers. It will also provide useful information for efficient implementation of transactional memory.