Patterns for Parallel Software Design

9.2. 9.2 Design Experience and Techniques

Mature industries tend to have handbooks of design experience and techniques which describe successful solutions to known problems using the design and engineering disciplines for such industries. Designers and engineers rarely start their designs from scratch, but normally reuse known design solutions with a proven record of success. 'The extra performance available by starting a design from scratch typically is not worth the cost' [POSA1]. In this sense software patterns and the pattern community represent the clearest attempt to collect design experience and techniques for software development.

This book tries to apply this sort of design experience and techniques to the area of parallel software design, together with other further work on discovering software patterns for parallel programming. Parallel programming problems should be addressed by good practice, design experience and proven techniques. Several approaches have focused on capturing and systemizing successful design experience and techniques used in previous parallel software developments. In particular, the software patterns presented in this book represent one of the most important efforts towards the creation of a handbook of good design and programming practices for parallel software design. The software patterns presented here are focused on developing the coordination, communication and synchronization that, together with processing components, attempt to simplify ...