UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM presents "Introducing Parallel Pixie Dust: Advanced Library-Based Support for Parallelism in C++" Jason McGuiness (Alumus of School of Computer Science, University of Hertfordshire) 27 April 2011 (Wednesday) Meeting Room LD454 Hatfield, College Lane Campus 1-2 pm Everyone is Welcome to Attend Refreshments will be available Abstract: Maximizing the performance of all types of software on the new multi-core architectures means programmers would have to exploit the exposed thread-level parallelism using the threading API of the OS, which has been and still is non-trivial. The usual library-based approach (using Pthreads, OpenMP or Win32) has been very problematic: locking has not been found to be composable because it is an aspect of the code: it cross-cuts the usual approaches of functional decomposition or object-orientation. The portions of code that express parallelism have been intimately entangled with the business-logic code. This has resulted in reductions of code re-usability and increased complexity for testability, as has already been mentioned in prior presentations. The presenter took on a challenge: how much could be achieved by designing a C++ thread library, called Parallel Pixie Dust ([Parallel Pixie Dust (PPD)||http://libjmmcg.sf.net/]), to assist the programmer? The design goals of this C++ library are: *Simplifying using parallelism by providing a data-flow model, to specifically target: -programming control-flow threading, -certain HPC issues relating to processing large, repeated data structures. *Provide efficient parallel algorithms. *Guarantee via library design that race conditions and deadlocks would not be present. *That the program would execute an efficient parallel schedule due to the design of the library. *Address the issues of debugging such parallelized programs. *Co-exist with other thread libraries such as OpenMP or Intel Thread Building Blocks. --------------------------------------------------- Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium http://homepages.stca.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/colloq