Parallel Iterator for Parallelising Object Oriented Applications

With the advent of multi-core processors, desktop application developers must finally face parallel computing and its challenges. A large portion of the computational load in a program rests within iterative computations. In object-oriented languages these are commonly handled using iterators which are inadequate for parallel programming. This paper presents a powerful parallel iterator concept for object-oriented programmers to use for the parallel traversal of a collection of elements. The parallel iterator allows the structure of the program to remain unchanged, it may be used with any collection type (even those inherently sequential) and it supports several scheduling schemes which may even be decided dynamically at run-time. Along with the ease of use, the results reveal negligible overhead and the expected inherent speedup.