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AboutConcurrency & Parallelism Framework for Groovy&Java
Introduction
The world of mainstream computing is changing rapidly these days. If you open the case and look under the covers of your computer, you’ll most likely see a dual-core processor there, or a quad-core one, if you have a high-end computer. We all now run our software on multi-processor systems.
The code we write today and tomorrow will probably never run on a single processor system: parallel hardware has become standard. Not so with the software though, at least not yet. People still create single-threaded code, even though it will not be able to leverage the full power of current and future hardware.
| The code we write today will probably never run on a single processor system ! |
Some developers experiment with low-level concurrency primitives, like threads, and locks or synchronized blocks. However, it has become obvious that the shared-memory multi-threading approach used at the application level causes more trouble than it solves. Low-level concurrency handling is usually hard to get right, and it’s not much fun either.
With such a radical change in hardware, software inevitably has to change dramatically too. Higher-levelS OF concurrency and parallelism concepts like map/reduce, fork/join, actors and dataflow provide natural abstractions for different types of problem domains while leveraging the multi-core hardware.
Meet GPars
Meet GPars, an open-source concurrency and parallelism library for Java and Groovy that gives you a number of high-level abstractions to write concurrent and parallel code in Groovy (map/reduce, fork/join, asynchronous closures, actors, agents, dataflow concurrency and other concepts), which can make your Java and Groovy code concurrent and/or parallel with little effort.
With GPars, your Java and/or Groovy code can easily utilize all the available processors on the target system. You can run multiple calculations at the same time, request network resources in parallel, safely solve hierarchical divide-and-conquer problems, perform functional style map/reduce or data parallel collection processing or build your applications around the actor or dataflow model.
If you’re working on a commercial, open-source, educational or any other type of software project in Groovy, download the binaries or integrate them from the Maven repository and get going. The door to writing highly concurrent and/or parallel Java and Groovy code is wide open. Enjoy!
| Does your system already have Groovy version 1.8 or later ? If so, GPars is also included, so there’s no need for another download. ;-) |
How ?
The GPars framework offers Java developers intuitive and safe ways to handle Java or Groovy tasks concurrently. Leveraging the enormous flexibility of the Groovy programing language and building on proven Java technologies, we aim to make concurrent programming for multi-core hardware intuitive, robust and enjoyable.
GPars is a multi-paradigm concurrency framework, offering several mutually cooperating high-level concurrency abstractions, such as Dataflow operators, Promises, CSP, Actors, Asynchronous Functions, Agents and Parallel Collections.
Why people like GPars
Hear those who are using GPars already, check out the User Voices.
The traditional thread-based concurrency model built into Java doesn’t match well with the natural human sense for parallelism. While this was not a problem at times, when the level of parallelism in software was low and concurrency offered only limited benefits compared to sequential code.
Nowadays, with the number of cores on a single main-stream chip doubling almost every year, sequential code quickly looses ground and fails to compete in performance and hardware utilization with concurrent code.
Inevitably, for concurrent programming to be effective, the mental models of concurrent systems interactions that people create in their heads have to respect the nature of human brains more than the wires on the chips. Luckily, such abstractions have been around for several decades, used at universities, in telephone switches, the super-computing industry and some other inherently concurrent domains. The current challenge for GPars is to bring these abstractions up to the mainstream software developers to help us solve our practical daily issues.
A User Guide
Please refer to our most recent User Guide or any of our older User Guides for an extensive coverage of GPars abstractions. You may also like a few Demos to get a taste of what’s in here for you.
The framework provides straightforward Java or Groovy-based APIs to declare which parts of the code should be performed in parallel. Collections can have their elements processed concurrently, closures can be turned into composable asynchronous functions and run in the background on your behalf, mutable data can be protected by agents or software transactional memory.
For the common scenario that one or more results are calculated concurrently, but need to be processed as soon as they are available, GPars makes it a breeze to correctly model this with Dataflow. Dataflow variables and channels give you a handy abstraction of single-assignment multiple-read data elements, while dataflow operators let you build efficient concurrent data-processing networks.
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final SyncDataflowQueue channel = new SyncDataflowQueue()
def producer = task {
(1..30).each {
channel << it //writing to a channel
println "Just sent $it"
}
}
def consumer = task {
while (true) {
sleep 500 //simulating a slow consumer
final Object msg = channel.val
println "Received $msg"
}
}
producer.join()
The concept of Actors as an approach to organizing concurrent activities has recently gained new popularity (thanks to the Scala, Erlang, and other programming languages).
GPars implements this concept for Java and Groovy developers. With actors support, you can quickly create several independent Actors, which consume messages passed to them and communicate with other actors by sending them messages. You then build your solution by combining these actors into a communication network.
Let the Fun Begin!
| Here’s an overview of the concepts available in GPars |
Core Areas of Interest
Project’s Main Priorities
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Good and clean design
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Elegant Java and Groovy APIs
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Flexibility through meta-programming
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Application-level solutions that scale with the number of CPU cores
Fast Track
If you want to start experimenting with GPars right away, use these Fast Track tips to get up and running quickly.
What They Say About GPars
Check out the User Voices to hear opinions of people walked here before you.
Licencing
GPars is distributed under the open-source Apache 2 License. By using GPars you accept fully the terms stated in the license. For full details, please see the Apache 2 License document or License.