On the Codification of Coordination: An Ontological Tool for Pattern Mining

One of the challenges developers face when dealing with parallelism is that purely static views of code tend not to reveal internal dynamics and causal relationships that can be problematic. This paper considers parallelism from multiple perspectives—from kinesthetic exercises involving elementary school children, to lines of code spanning six different parallelization mechanisms. We attempt to reconcile these views and develop an ontology designed to support pattern mining in parallel code bases. We show that, both kinesthetically and in the code bases, coordination emerges as a subtle entity that is difficult to identify in a coherent and conceptually concise manner. We believe that low level implementation patterns and micro patterns will be crucial for comprehension of coordination, and propose tool support for effective mining. Further, we suggest a means of accomplishing a semi-automated ontological mapping for parallelization mechanisms, and offer this up to help designers uncover patterns and pattern compositions. 1