Parallel Active Object Pattern

With parallel applications becoming more and more popular even in real-time systems, the demand for safe and easyto- use software libraries and frameworks for parallel and concurrent computations is growing immensely. These frameworks usually provide an implementation for different sets of software patterns. A very well known software pattern for concurrency is the Active Object pattern, that allows various threads to have synchronized access to an object in question. This paper presents the Parallel Active Object pattern, which extends the common Active Object pattern to support the use of objects, whose computations are profoundly enhanced by a parallel execution. Furthermore, a C++ software framework is introduced, which implements the Parallel Active Object pattern and thus provides the possibility of using task or data parallel patterns, for example Map, Reduce and Divide-and-Conquer, on the active object's calculations. The proposed framework is evaluated against two other popular libraries, namely OpenMP and Intel Threading Building Blocks. Through utilization of the C++11 standard and template classes a simple user interface is provided, which abstracts the distribution of workloads among the worker threads. By making use of the C++ Standard Template Library the framework can easily be ported to embedded systems and by extending the pattern through real-time capabilities, which ensure a timely and reliable execution of the method requests, the intention of providing the framework for time critical environments is also targeted in the future.