Building Parallel Applications using Design Patterns

Parallel application design and development is a major area of interest in the domain of high performance scientific and industrial computing. In fact, parallel computing is becoming an integral part in several major application domains, for instance: space, medicine, cancer and genetic research, graphics and animation, image processing-to name a few. With the advent of fast interconnecting networks of workstations and PCs, it is now becoming increasingly possible to develop high-performance parallel applications using the combined computing powers of these networked-resources, at no extra cost. Contrast this to the situation until the early 90s, where parallel computing was largely confined only to special-purpose parallel computers, each priced high enough to be affordable only by major research/academic institutions. Consequently, high-speed networks and fast general-purpose computers are aiding towards the mainstream adoption of parallel computing at a much more affordable cost. However it must be mentioned here that parallel computing is not simple. The complexity arises due to the accumulation of many low-level parallelism related intricate details, on top of the sequential code. As an aid to handle some of these complexities, this research proposes a generic model for designing and developing parallel applications through the employment of reusable patterns in parallel computing. The concept of design patterns has been extensively studied and used in the context of object-oriented software design. Patterns in this context describe strategies for solving recurring design problems in systematic and general ways (Gamma et al., 1994). Similar ideas are being explored in other disciplines of computing as well. For instance, ACE (the Adaptive Communication Environment) is an object-oriented toolkit that implements various network-level patterns to simplify the development of concurrent, event driven communication software (Schmidt, 1994). In the parallel computing domain, design patterns describe recurring parallel computational problems of similar structure and communication