Using ownership to reason about inherent parallelism in object-oriented programs

Abstract

With the emergence of multi-cores into the mainstream, there is a growing need for systems to allow programmers and automated systems to reason about data dependencies and inherent parallelism in imperative object-oriented languages. In this paper we exploit the structure of object-oriented programs to abstract computational side-effects. We capture and validate these effects using a static type system. We use these as the basis of sufficient conditions for several different data and task parallelism patterns. We compliment our static type system with a lightweight runtime system to allow for parallelization in the presence of complex data flows. We have a functioning compiler and worked examples to demonstrate the practicality of our solution. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.