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Designing and Building Parallel Programs by Ian Foster Recommended

ISBN: 0 201 57594 9       Publisher: Addison-Wesley       Pages: 377pages       Price: £36-95

Categories:   parallel systems

Reviewed by Francis Glassborow in C Vu 7-4 (May 1995)

Designing and Building Parallel Programs is the first book I have come across (apart from specialist ones for Occam) that deals with practical details of concern to the working programmer. I think the range is still rather wide, using, as it does, both Compositional C++ and FORTRAN M. Consideration is also given to High Performance FORTRAN.

One problem that might spring to mind is that of finding a compiler to support parallel processing. This book has an interesting solution to this problem; there is an entire World Wide Web version of the book available, and that version includes links to relevant software which includes a PD Compositional C++ compiler.

I wish I had time to pursue the whole of this issue further but time seems to have limitations on its elasticity. What I would like is for someone with a little time and a lot of interest (or maybe a lot of both) to volunteer to take this book, use it, its on line version and the PD version of Compositional C++. If possible I would then like them to start a column (in Overload if Sean agrees) as a tutorial on CC++. I think this would be a great service to ACCU members. If other areas such as data-parallel C and C Linda could be covered in C VU we would be continuing to meet our objective of supporting not only C but languages derived from it.

Any takers? I very much hope so.

If you have an interest in parallel processing (and that would seem to be important for the future) this is a book you should look at.