Multi-way Divide and Conquer Parallel Programming based on PLists

Divide and Conquer with all its variants represents an important paradigm of parallel programming. In this paper we present an implementation of PLists data structures and functions, which is introduced as an extension of a Java parallel programming framework - JPLF. The JPLF framework was initially based on PowerLists and their associated theory. By using functions defined on PLists, we may easily define programs based on the multi-way Divide and Conquer paradigm. Also, their definition allows the description of any kind of embarrassingly parallel computation. By introducing PLists into the JPLF framework, its application domain is very much enlarged, and also the flexibility of choosing the best computation variants is increased. The sizes of the data lists are not constrained any more - as it is for PowerLists to a power of two - and the level of parallelism could be much easier controlled. The experiments done for several applications reveal important improvements of the obtained performance.