Berna L. Massingill

A design pattern language for engineering (parallel) software: merging the PLPP and OPL projects

Parallel programming is stuck. To make progress, we need to step back and understand the software people wish to engineer. We do this with a design pattern language. This paper provides background for a lively discussion of this pattern language. We present the context for the problem, the layers in the design pattern language, and descriptions of the patterns themselves.

Graphical game development in CS2: a flexible infrastructure for a semester long project

This paper discusses a project that has been used to teach CS2 for six semesters at Trinity University. The project spans the full semester, and all eight of the assignments students turn in are part of the project. For this project, the students develop a 2-D game using a framework written by one of the authors. The framework is intended to allow students to produce some results early in the semester before they have significant knowledge without constraining them or doing too much for them. It was originally written for Java 1.3 and has evolved for Java 1.4 and now Java 5. We discuss the details of this project, the benefits it provides, and our experience with it.

Reengineering for Parallelism: an entry point into PLPP for legacy applications

Many parallel programs begin as legacy sequential code that is later reengineered to take advantage of parallel hardware. This paper presents a pattern called Reengineering for Parallelism to help with this task. The new pattern is intended to be used in conjunction with PLPP (Pattern Language for Parallel Programming), described in our book (Mattson TG, Sanders BA, Massingill BL. Patterns for Parallel Programming. Addison‐Wesley: Reading, MA, 2004). PLPP contains a structured collection of patterns and embodies a methodology for developing parallel programs in which the programmer starts with a good understanding of the problem, works through a sequence of patterns, and finally ends up with the code. Most of the patterns in PLPP are also applicable when reengineering legacy code, but it is not always clear how to get started. Reengineering for Parallelism provides an alternate point of entry into PLPP and addresses particular issues that arise when dealing with legacy code. Copyright

SIMD : an additional pattern for PLPP (pattern language for parallel programming)

Recent trends in hardware, such as IBMs Cell Broadband Engine and GPUs that can be used for general-purpose computing, have made widely available systems for which a SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) style of data-parallel programming is appropriate. This paper presents a pattern to help software developers construct parallel programs for environments that support this style of data parallelism. In this approach, the program is viewed as a single thread of control, with implicitly parallel updates to data. This pattern is a new addition to the Pattern Language for Parallel Programming (PLPP) presented in our previous work [18, 19].