Barracuda, an Open Source Framework for Parallelizing Divide and Conquer Algorithm

Abstract

This paper presents a newly-created Barracuda open-source framework which aims to parallelize Java divide and conquer applications. This framework exploits implicit for-loop parallelism in dividing and merging operations. So, this makes it a mixture of parallel for-loop and task parallelism. It targets shared-memory multiprocessors and hybrid distributed shared-memory architectures. We highlight the effectiveness of the framework and focus on the performance gain and programming effort by using this framework. Barracuda aims at large public actors as well as various application domains. In terms of performance achievement, it is very close to Fork/Join framework while allowing end-users to only focus on refactoring code and experts to have the opportunity to improve it.