This is an excerpt from a grant proposal; it explains the ICSI Sather group's position on parallel programming. Our goal is to allow general purpose, composable parallel libraries without sacrificing the high performance required for scientific applications.

pSather, codesigned with serial Sather, encourages cleaner designs than result with evolutionary extensions to existing languages. In contrast to approaches that rely only on compile time analysis or data parallelism, pSather aims at providing high performance parallel computing by using object-oriented techniques to make it possible to construct general purpose, composable parallel libraries. Unlike actor languages, pSather treats object-orientation and parallelism as orthogonal concepts; synchronization is explicit.