Patterns for Parallel Programming (Software Patterns Series)

Rating:
Summary: a pattern language
Review: This book tries to do for parallel programming what the seminal Gang of Four book did for sequential programming. While it remains to be seen if Mattson, Sanders and Massingill will succeed, their book serves a vital educational role.

Until the 90s, parallel programming was relatively rare. But as hardware continued to get cheaper, many practical uses emerged. The authors point out that the bottleneck has now shifted to software. How does one find concurrency in a design? And given this, how to code it? The book tackles both issues. The latter is treated by explaining how to use MPI, OpenMP and Java for parallel coding. Where MPI and OpenMP were expressly made for this task. And with Java, the book discusses its concurrency classes and how these can be applied to parallel problems.

The former issue of somehow finding concurrency is harder. This is really a wetware issue. You are the wetware. The book's core value is in showing common parallel patterns, that distills the essence of much previous work in the field. Plus, the book is not just iterating through a list of such patterns. As with the GoF, we have a pattern language. A metalevel, in which a walkthrough of the patterns and comparing these with your problem, helps you find appropriate patterns to map it to.