Special section on parallel programming

This special section of The Journal of Supercomputing contains revised and extended versions of selected papers presented at the 7th Workshop on Language-Based Parallel Programming Models, WLPP 2017, which was a part of the 12th International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics, PPAM 2017, held on September 10–13, 2017, in Lublin, Poland. WLPP 2017 was a two-day workshop focusing on high-level programming for large-scale parallel systems and multicore processors, with special emphasis on component architectures and models. Its goal was to bring together researchers working in the areas of applications, computational models, language design, compilers, system architecture, and programming tools to discuss new developments in programming Clouds and parallel systems. Papers in this section cover the most important topics presented during the workshop. The first two deal with parallel programming models. Thoman et al. [4] provide an initial task-focused taxonomy for HPC technologies, which covers both programming interfaces and runtime mechanisms and discuss its usefulness by classifying state-of-the-art task-based environments that are used today. Posner and Fohry [7] propose a hybrid work stealing scheme, which combines the lifeline-based variant of distributed task pools with the node-internal load balancing implemented as an extension of the APGAS library for Java.