Overall Goals

The primary goal of the Amino open source software project is to develop concurrent libraries or building blocks that can be used by programmers. These building blocks share the following properties:

1. High-performance and good scalability
2. Portable across various platforms (hardware/OS)
3. Consistent programming idioms (with differences in expression of APIs as necessary) across Java, C/C++ and other popular programming languages.
4. Exploitation of the latest multicore processors and systems
5. Tested for performance and correctness at scale

There is no restriction about the type of concurrent components one can contribute to the project as long as they are shown to be useful in building real applications. However, we do plan to focus the project in four specific ways at least at the outset.

1. Initial focus will be on components which run on shared memory systems.
2. There is a bias toward working on components which are very broadly usable.
3. We plan to focus on Java and C/C++.
4. At the outset, we expect the platform to be x86/Linux.

Initial Goals

The initial set of building blocks can be grouped into 4 categories

1. Data Structures: A set of lockfree collection classes. Since these datastructures were developed using lockfree algorithms, they enjoy some of the basic lockfree properties like, immunity from different types of deadlocks, immunity for priority inversion, etc.
2. Patterns and Scheduling Algorithms: Most application parallelization efforts follow one or more of a number of well known parallel computation patterns. We provide a set of patterns that developers can directly leverage to build parallel applications. The patterns we propose to provide will include (but not limited to): Master-Worker, Map-reduce, Divide and conquer, Pipeline, etc. We also plan to provide a set of schedulers. The schedulers can be used in conjunction with the patterns classes.
3. Parallel implementations of general-purpose functions: Example of functions to include, but not limited to:
   1. String, Sequence and Array functions: Sort, Search, Merge, Rank, Compare, Reverse, Shuffle, Rotate, Median, etc.
   2. Tree and Graph functions: Connected Components, Spanning Trees, Shortest Path, Graph Coloring, etc.
4. Atomics, STM, etc.
   1. Deliver a C++ implementation of atomics. This implementation will be based on the draft of the C++ standards definition of the interface for atomics.
   2. Deliver an open, flexible implementation of Software Transactional Memory.