CSR: Medium: Easy PRAM-Based High-Performance Parallel Programming with Immediate Concurrent Execution (ICE)

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Parallel programming is in crisis: its difficulty dissuades all but the most determined (and deep-pocketed)software vendors, and speedups are often disappointing for all but regular programs. Merely augmentingthe substantial knowledge-base of parallel computing with incremental ideas in algorithms, programminglanguages, compilers, hardware, power or applications, interesting as they may be, is unlikely to changethis reality.This project advances a powerful idea for drastically improving ease-of-programming within the context ofa holistic many-core research architecture called XMT. Our contention is that without the co-design oflanguage and architecture, one cannot conquer the twin challenges of easy programming and efficientparallelization of irregular programs. Therefore we are developing a new easy-to-program languagecalled ICE as part of ecosystem consisting of XMT, the PRAM algorithmic model, and ICE, that togetherdeliver on this twin goal. The XMT architecture, developed at UMD over the last decade, is capable ofexploiting fine-grained parallelism in irregular programs. ICE is based on the successful PRAM algorithmmodel, which provides a rich theory for parallel programming, and has led to published parallel algorithmsfor hundreds of problems.The broader impact of this project includes (i) much easier parallel programming model leading to moresuccinct and intuitive code; (ii) freeing the programmer of many complex issues in parallel programming,leading to greater productivity and acceptance of parallel programming; (iii) the nearness of ICE andPRAM means that programmers would instantly have a rich ?library? of parallel algorithms without havingto write their own; (iv) a language especially suitable to an architecture that has demonstratedunprecedented speedups on hard-to-parallelize irregular applications; and (v) a very active outreachprogram that has already seen XMT being used at many research and educational institutions.