Parallel software development using an object-oriented modelling technique

Abstract

A significant amount of interest is currently being shown in the relationship between the paradigms of object-orientation and concurrency. This stems from the observation that objects display a great deal of concurrent behaviour in the way they can co-exist with one another. As a result, much research effort has gone into exploiting this relationship, primarily in the development of programming languages specifically aimed at producing parallel software. However, the exploitation of the object-oriented paradigm in the analysis and design of parallel software has not seen the same level of interest. This work presents an investigation into adopting object-oriented approaches during the analysis and design of parallel software by taking a well established object modelling method (OMT) and extending it using the PARSE process graph notation to account for the added dimensions of concurrency. This hybrid method is analysed and discussed by way of the development and implementation of a common parallel software scenario. The results of this exercise show that adopting an object-oriented view at the analysis and design stage of development can benefit the production of such a parallel software solution.