GEMs: shared-memory parallel programming for Node.js

Daniele Bonetta, Luca Salucci, Stefan Marr, Walter Binder

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

JavaScript is the most popular programming language for client-side Web applications, and Node.js has popularized the language for server-side computing, too. In this domain, the minimal support for parallel programming remains however a major limitation. In this paper we introduce a novel parallel programming abstraction called Generic Messages (GEMs). GEMs allow one to combine message passing and shared-memory parallelism, extending the classes of parallel applications that can be built with Node.js. GEMs have customizable semantics and enable several forms of thread safety, isolation, and concurrency control. GEMs are designed as convenient JavaScript abstractions that expose high-level and safe parallelism models to the developer. Experiments show that GEMs outperform equivalent Node.js applications thanks to their usage of shared memory.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)531-547
JournalACM Sigplan Notices
Volume51
Issue number10
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 19 Oct 2016
Externally publishedYes

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