Our Pattern Language

Hardware trends in recent years have definitely shown the need for an increase in parallelism. The number of processor cores seems to be increasing at a fairly steady rate. If this truly is the trend of the future, parallel software is a must.

The Our Pattern Language (OPL) initiative is a project with a goal of helping to foster parallel development through the use of patterns and a conceptual framework. To date, OPL has been organized into several different layers: architectural patterns, computational patterns, parallel algorithm strategy patterns, implementation strategy patterns, and concurrent execution patterns. The lower layers are where most of the work has been focused to date.

I am excited to see how the future unfolds in terms of parallel programming. It is definitely a trend that needs to be on any developer's radar and will almost certainly continue to shape the development landscape over the next few years (decade(s)?). The degree to which he/she may need to engage will be driven to a certain degree on the type of projects that they work on. However, I think it is important enough and definitely warrants at least some thought.