Task Parallelism, Recursive Splitting, Discrete Event

I thought had an inkling of an idea of what the Task Parallelism pattern. Boy, was I wrong. After reading the context a couple of times, it was the forces section that helped shed some light on what was actually being presented. Unfortunately, the examples of Monte Carlo simulations on a cluster of computers did not help solidify the pattern being presented. Perhaps a more concrete code example would have been more beneficial. I will be interested in hearing the discussion on this topic.

The Recursive Splitting pattern felt a bit like revisiting the fork/join pattern with a little twist. I am not sure how many other patterns take load balancing into account when determining the number of recursive splits to use. Too many or too few splits are of little benefit to the overall speed of the algorithm.

The Discrete Event pattern presents a method for trying to provide some form of order when dealing with independent tasks. Pessimistic approaches ensure the events are always executed in order at the expense of increased latency and communication overhead. I agree with the author in believing a deadlock timeout is more successful than deadlock detection. I also prefer message passing as a means for communication in systems.