Habanero-Java library

Abstract

With the advent of the multicore era, it is clear that future growth in application performance will primarily come from increased parallelism. We believe parallelism should be introduced early into the Computer Science curriculum to educate students on the fundamentals of parallel computation. In this paper, we introduce the newly-created Habanero-Java library (HJlib), a pure Java 8 library implementation of the pedagogic parallel programming model [12]. HJlib has been used in teaching a sophomore-level course titled Fundamentals of Parallel Programming at Rice University.HJlib adds to the Java ecosystem a powerful and portable task parallel programming model that can be used to parallelize both regular and irregular applications. By relying on simple orthogonal parallel constructs with important safety properties, HJlib allows programmers with a basic knowledge of Java to get started with parallel programming concepts by writing or refactoring applications to harness the power of multicore architecture. The HJlib APIs make extensive use of lambda expressions and can run on any Java 8 JVM. HJlib runtime feedback capabilities, such as the abstract execution metrics and the deadlock detector, help the programmer to obtain feedback on theoretical performance as well as the presence of potential bugs in their program.Being an implementation of a pedagogic programming model, HJlib is also an attractive tool for both educators and researchers. HJlib is actively being used in multiple research projects at Rice and also by external independent collaborators. These projects include exploitation of homogeneous and heterogeneous multicore parallelism in big data applications written for the Hadoop platform [20, 43].