Four styles of parallel and net programming

Abstract

This paper reviews the programming landscape for parallel and network computing systems, focusing on four styles of concurrent programming models, and example languages/libraries. The four styles correspond to four scales of the targeted systems. At the smallest coprocessor scale, Single Instruction Multiple Thread (SIMT) and Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) are considered. Transactional memory is discussed at the multicore or process scale. The MapReduce style is examined at the datacenter scale. At the Internet scale, Grid Service Markup Language (GSML) is reviewed, which intends to integrate resources distributed across multiple datacenters. The four styles are concerned with and emphasize different issues, which are needed by systems at different scales. This paper discusses issues related to efficiency, ease of use, and expressiveness. © Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag GmbH 2009.