The simplest approach is to use ExecutorService.invokeAll() which does what you want in a one-liner. In your parlance, you'll need to modify or wrap ComputeDTask to implement Callable<>, which can give you quite a bit more flexibility. Probably in your app there is a meaningful implementation of Callable.call(), but here's a way to wrap it if not using Executors.callable().
ExecutorService es = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(2);
List<Callable<Object>> todo = new ArrayList<Callable<Object>>(singleTable.size());
for (DataTable singleTable: uniquePhrases) {
todo.add(Executors.callable(new ComputeDTask(singleTable)));
}
List<Future<Object>> answers = es.invokeAll(todo);
As others have pointed out, you could use the timeout version of invokeAll() if appropriate. In this example, answers is going to contain a bunch of Futures which will return nulls (see definition of Executors.callable(). Probably what you want to do is a slight refactoring so you can get a useful answer back, or a reference to the underlying ComputeDTask, but I can't tell from your example.
If it isn't clear, note that invokeAll() will not return until all the tasks are completed. (i.e., all the Futures in your answers collection will report .isDone() if asked.) This avoids all the manual shutdown, awaitTermination, etc... and allows you to reuse this ExecutorService neatly for multiple cycles, if desired.
There are a few related questions on SO:
None of these are strictly on-point for your question, but they do provide a bit of color about how folks think Executor/ExecutorService ought to be used.