The performance of parallel code significantly depends on the parallel task granularity (PTG). If the PTG is too coarse, performance suffers due to load imbalance; if the PTG is too fine, performance suffers from the overhead that is induced by parallel task creation and scheduling.

Object-oriented programming languages like Java provide only low-level constructs (e.g., starting a thread) to describe concurrency. High-level abstractions (e.g., thread pools) are merely provided as a library. As a result, a compiler is not aware of the high-level semantics of a parallel library and therefore misses important optimization opportunities. This paper presents a simple source language extension based on which a compiler is provided with the opportunity to perform new optimizations that are particularly effective for parallel code.