Parallel closures: a new twist on an old idea

• Authors: Nicholas D. Matsakis
• Venue: HotPar'12 Proceedings of the 4th USENIX conference on Hot Topics in Parallelism
• Year: 2012

This paper presents a lightweight task framework and accompanying type system that statically guarantee deterministic execution. The framework is based on the familiar model of fork-join parallelism, but with two important twists. First, child tasks do not begin execution immediately upon creation, but rather they are both scheduled and joined as one atomic action; this change prevents the parent task from racing with its children. Second, the body of a child task is specified as a parallel closure. Parallel closures are a novel variation on traditional closures in which the data inherited from the environment is read-only. Parallel closures have the important property that they can be executed in parallel with one another without creating data races, even if they share the same environment. We also have a controlled means to grant mutable access to data in the environment where necessary. We have implemented a prototype of our framework in Java. The prototype includes a typechecker that enforces the constraint that parallel closures cannot modify their environment. The paper describes how the prototype has been used to implement a number of realistic examples and also explains how parallel closures can support the creation of structured parallel programming abstractions.