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Patterns and Skeletons for Parallel and Distributed Computing
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by Fethi A. Rabhi and Sergei Gorlatch
Sales Rank: 2766482
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List Price: $145.00
$145.00
At Amazon
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Hardcover: 333 pages
Publisher: Springer; 1 edition November 11, 2002
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1852335068
ISBN-13: 978-1852335069
Product Dimensions:
9.2 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
Product Description
Patterns and Skeletons for Parallel and Distributed Computing is a unique survey of research work in high-level parallel and distributed computing over the past ten years. Comprising contributions from the leading researchers in Europe and the US, it looks at interaction patterns and their role in parallel and distributed processing, and demonstrates for the first time the link between skeletons and design patterns. It focuses on computation and communication structures that are beyond simple message-passing or remote procedure calling, and also on pragmatic approaches that lead to practical design and programming methodologies with their associated compilers and tools. The book is divided into two parts which cover: skeletons-related material such as expressing and composing skeletons, formal transformation, cost modelling and languages, compilers and run-time systems for skeleton-based programming.- design patterns and other related concepts, applied to other areas such as real-time, embedded and distributed systems. It will be an essential reference for researchers undertaking new projects in this area, and will also provide useful background reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses on parallel or distributed system design.
Customer Reviews & Comments
Somehow, this book came across as too narrow and too broad, both at the same time. Too narrow, in that each chapter was a very detailed study of a specific implementation or idea. The first few chapters, for example, presented particular extensions to the Haskell programming langauge, intended to support parallel programming. Lord knows that parallel systems need all the help they can get. If hard-core functional programming is the answer, though, I'm not sure I heard the question. Functional programmers have been beating their drum for at least 30 years, and still have little effect on the main parade of software development. What they call "skeletons" seem to be fairly ordinary constructs for parallelism, including co-begin and pipelining. I have trouble getting excited about seeing them presented in obscure notation. I would also have hoped to see more demanding kinds of applications. Ray-tracing was a common one, but ray-tracing is "embarassingly parallel." It's almost hard not to get a parallel speedup approaching 1:1 with the number of processors. The remainder of the book operates at a very different level. Instead of specific syntax in a specific language, it presents a number of design patterns at a very high conceptual level. Instead of particular implementations on specific processors, it discusses techniques that can be applied across loosely-coupled, web-based ensembles. The design pattern discussion was adequate, but seemed an odd mate for the low-level detail of the book's first section. Even though I work every day with highly parallel computation, I just didn't come away with much I could use. I found this book frankly disappointing.
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Patterns and Skeletons for Parallel and Distributed Computing
List Price: $145.00
Available from Amazon
Price: $145.00
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