@PT: Unobtrusive parallel programming with Java annotations

摘要

Parallel computing techniques have been supported by programming languages in two majorways: either library-based APIs or extended language constructs. Library-based features areportable and offer fine-grained control on parallelization details. However, they rely on individualprogrammerskills; thus, theymay lead to inconsistent implementations and considerable coderestructurings. On the contrary, language constructs promote environments that largely concealthe details of parallel programming techniques. However, they normally reduce programmercontrol over the granularity of parallelization and impose additional development concepts andcompilation requirements that may sacrifice ease of use and portability. Therefore, approachesthat balance between programmer control on parallelization details, intuitiveness of concepts,and portability can gain priority over other paradigms. In this paper, we discuss@PT (AnnotationParallelTask), a parallel computing frameworkthat proposes Java annotations, standard Java components,as its language constructs.@PT takes an object-oriented approach on efficient executionand management of asynchronous tasks, with a special focus on GUI-responsive applications.This paper presents the annotation-based programming interface of the framework and its fundamentalparallelization concepts. Furthermore, it studies the usability and performance of @PTby comparisons with other Java parallelization approaches in a set of standard benchmarks. Theobservations suggest that @PT maintains a simple programming interface, whereas it performsefficiently in different parallel computing domains.