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Parallel Task for Parallelising Object-Oriented Desktop Applications

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Abstract

With the arrival of multi-cores for mainstream desktop systems, developers must invest the effort of parallelising their applications in order to benefit from these systems. However, the structure of these interactive desktop applications is noticeably different from the traditional batch-like applications of the engineering and scientific fields. We present Parallel Task (short ParaTask), a solution to assist the parallelisation of object-oriented applications, with the unique feature of including support for the parallelisation of graphical user interface applications. In the simple, but common, cases concurrency is introduced with a single keyword. ParaTask sets itself apart from the many existing object-oriented parallelisation approaches by integrating different task types into the same model and its careful adherence to object-oriented principles. Due to the wide variety of parallelisation needs, ParaTask provides intuitive support for dependence handling, non-blocking notification and exception handling in an asynchronous environment as well as supporting a flexible task scheduling runtime (currently work-sharing, work-stealing and a combination of the two are supported). The performance is excellent compared to traditional Java parallelisation approaches, shown using a variety of different workloads.

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Notes

  1. Preliminary proof-of-concept development of ParaTask was presented here [15].

  2. To download the latest ParaTask and other related resources, visit www.parallelit.org.

  3. The term task-safe (as opposed to thread-safe) is used to denote parallel-safe code since ParaTask is a tasking-model (not a threading-model). This means that programmers think in terms of tasks rather than threads (explained further in Sect. 4.2.2).

  4. I/O tasks are an intentional exception, but not a general solution to the here discussed issue.

  5. The TaskID is needed if the method being notified accepts TaskID as parameter, otherwise it is omitted. This ensures at compile time that the correct method signature is used.

  6. Cilk Art’s Cilk++ removes this requirement, since all functions are compiled by default to use the Cilk calling convention.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Nasser Giacaman & Oliver Sinnen

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  1. Nasser Giacaman
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  2. Oliver Sinnen
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Correspondence to Nasser Giacaman.

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Giacaman, N., Sinnen, O. Parallel Task for Parallelising Object-Oriented Desktop Applications. Int J Parallel Prog 41, 621–681 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10766-013-0238-9

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