Expanding design pattern to support parallel programming

Abstract

The design pattern concept is widely used in large object-oriented software development, but this should not be limited to the object-oriented field: it can be used in many other areas. Explicit parallel programming is well-known to be complex and error-prone, and design patterns can ease this work. This paper introduces a pattern-based approach for parallel programming, in which we classify design patterns into two levels to support (a) the parallel algorithm design phase and (b) the parallel coding phase, respectively. Through this approach, a programmer doesn't need much additional knowledge about parallel computing; what he need to do is to describe the problem he wants to solve and offer some parameters, sequential code or components. We demonstrate this approach with a case study in this paper.