A language-independent parallel refactoring framework

Funding: This work has been supportedby the European Union grants RII3-CT-2005-026133 SCIEnce: Symbolic Computing Infrastructure in Europe, IST-2010-248828 ADVANCE: Asynchronous and Dynamic Virtualisation through performance ANalysis to support Concurrency Engineering, and IST-2011-288570 ParaPhrase: Parallel Patterns for Adaptive Heterogeneous Multicore Systems, and by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council grant EP/G055181/1HPC-GAP: High Performance Computational Algebra.Recent trends towards increasingly parallel computers mean that there needs to be a seismic shift in programming practice. The time is rapidly approaching when most programming will be for parallel systems. However, most programming techniques in use today are geared towards sequential, or occasionally small-scale parallel, programming. While refactoring has so far mainly been applied to sequential programs, it is our contention that refactoring can play a key role in significantly improving the programmability of parallel systems, by allowing the programmer to apply a set of well-defined transformations in order to parallelise their programs. In this paper, we describe a new language-independent refactoring approach that helps introduce and tune parallelism through high-level design patterns targeting a set of well-specified parallel skeletons. We believe this new refactoring process is the key to allowing programmers to truly start thinking in parallel.Postprin