2 research outputs found
Type oriented parallel programming for Exascale
Whilst there have been great advances in HPC hardware and software in recent
years, the languages and models that we use to program these machines have
remained much more static. This is not from a lack of effort, but instead by
virtue of the fact that the foundation that many programming languages are
built on is not sufficient for the level of expressivity required for parallel
work. The result is an implicit trade-off between programmability and
performance which is made worse due to the fact that, whilst many scientific
users are experts within their own fields, they are not HPC experts.
Type oriented programming looks to address this by encoding the complexity of
a language via the type system. Most of the language functionality is contained
within a loosely coupled type library that can be flexibly used to control many
aspects such as parallelism. Due to the high level nature of this approach
there is much information available during compilation which can be used for
optimisation and, in the absence of type information, the compiler can apply
sensible default options thus supporting both the expert programmer and novice
alike.
We demonstrate that, at no performance or scalability penalty when running on
up to 8196 cores of a Cray XE6 system, codes written in this type oriented
manner provide improved programmability. The programmer is able to write
simple, implicit parallel, HPC code at a high level and then explicitly tune by
adding additional type information if required.Comment: As presented at the Exascale Applications and Software Conference
(EASC), 9th-11th April 201