Our Pattern Language (OPL): A Design Pattern Language for Engineering (Parallel) Software

The trend has been well established [Asanovic09]: parallel processors will dominate most if not every niche of computing. This move to parallelism was not a triumphant march forward to celebrate our success in creating productive and efficient software environments for parallel microprocessors. Instead it was a sudden retreat from the immediate danger of building powerinefficient microprocessors. Thus, while the semiconductor industry is banking its future on parallel microprocessors, the software industry has not yet offered a satisfying solution to the problem of programming these devices. We believe that we have an answer to this challenge. In particular, we believe that the key to productive and efficient software is in good software architecture, and that our challenges in programming parallel processors reflects a more fundamental weakness in our ability to architect software in general.