Approaches for integrating task and data parallelism

Languages that support both task and data parallelism are highly general and can exploit both forms of parallelism in a single application. However, integrating the two forms of parallelism cleanly in a coherent programming model is difficult. This article describes four languages (Fx, Opus, Orca, and Braid) that try to achieve such an integration. The main problems are how to support both SPMD- and MIMD-style programs, how to organize a parallel program's address space, and how to design the integrated model such that it can be implemented efficiently.