Parallelism as a Concern in Java through Fork-join Synchronization Patterns

We are facing a hardware revolution given by the increasing availability of multicore computers, clusters, Grids, and combinations of these. Consequently, there is plenty of computational power, but today's programmers are not fully prepared to exploit parallelism and distribution. Particularly, Java has helped in handling the heterogeneity of such environments, but there is a lack of facilities to easily and elegantly parallelizing applications. One path to this end seems to be the synthesis of semi-automatic parallelism and Parallelism as a Concern (PaaC). We briefly survey relevant Java-based parallel development tools, identify their drawbacks, and discuss some insights of an ongoing approach for mitigating them.