Programming model

The different programming models can be classified in 3 groups:

1. Explicit concurrent task. This is the most basic approach. The programmer explicitely creates and manipulates tasks. Depending on the extension the tasks can be heavy weight Unix processes or light weight processes (threads).
2. Data oriented model. This model can be seen as an Object-Oriented extension of the data parallel paradigm. Depending on the extensions, the parallelism will either be explicit or implicit. The explicit approach is generally based on geometric decomposition of data and introduction of new data type (e.g. aggregate class).
3. Active Objects. This model is a direct extension of the Object-Oriented paradigm, the program is organised as a collection of concurrently running active objects.
   The model can be further more break down into subgroups:
   • Some extensions support both active and passive objects, in others all objects are potentially active.
   • The active objects can either be single-threaded (i.e. only one member function can be executed at a time) or multi-threaded.

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