CSR-AES: Language, Compiler and Run-time Support for Irregular Applications in Emerging High-productivity Languages

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This project is developing new techniques for programming "irregular"parallel applications on high-performance highly parallel platforms,in collaboration with the Chapel programming language team at Cray,Inc. The project addresses several core issues for such applications.First, the work is extending Chapel's existing support foruser-defined irregular data distributions by adding general languagefeatures for specifying optimized handling of special cases, which areusually essential for adequate performance. Second, the project isdesigning and evaluating software transactional memory (STM)algorithms that scale to very large scale systems (e.g.,distributed-memory clusters), in contrast to previous STM work thathas focused on smaller-scale (cache coherent) systems. Third, a(separately funded) component of the overall research project isdeveloping deterministic language mechanisms for parallel computationson pointer-based data using a type and effect system for expressingparallelism and proving noninterference.If successful, this research will improve ease of programming anddeliver high performance for a wide range of applications that areespecially challenging for programmers today, namely, "irregular"applications. Further, the work aims to achieve two kinds of directtechnology transfer to industry: contributions to the Chapel languageand compiler effort at Cray, and contributions to the joint languagedesign effort in the DARPA HPCS program. The major researchartifacts, including the language specification and compilerprototype, will be made available as free, open source software forthe research community to use. The dynamic compiler infrastructurefor high-performance parallel programs should be a particularlyvaluable tool for further research in this area.