XPS: EXPL: Enabling An Ecosystem of Parallel Programming Abstractions

从智能手机到超级计算机，所有现代计算机都有多个处理器。由于编写有效利用这些资源的程序是出了名的困难，因此已经创建了许多显示各种语言抽象的编程语言。“正确的”抽象集取决于许多因素，包括手头应用程序的性质、程序员的复杂程度以及实现它所需的性能和所需工作的程度。对于这项研究，智力上的优势在于创建了支持并行编程语言抽象生态系统的工具和语言规范。这些将由独立的各方开发，并安全和自动地导入程序员的编译器中，以便程序员可以挑选他们认为最适合自己需要的语言功能。该项目更广泛的意义和重要性在于一种用于编写并行程序的变革性方法和支持工具，它极大地简化了新的并行编程和特定于域的语言功能的开发，因为它允许研究人员将他们的精力集中在新抽象的设计和实现上。通过使程序员更容易地使用和试验作为可组合语言扩展分发的新功能，他们可以更轻松地编写高性能和正确的并行程序。所提出的方法将使用基于上下文无关文法(用于指定具体语法)和属性文法(用于指定语义分析、优化和代码生成)的C编程语言规范。这定义了将并行编程语言扩展导入到的宿主语言。语言扩展也在这些形式化中指定，因为它们很容易与宿主语言和其他扩展组合在一起。语言扩展的模块化分析确保程序员选择的扩展的组合将成功，并产生不会异常终止的工作编译器。令人感兴趣的是新的和现有的语言抽象可以在这种可组合的语言扩展方法中实现的程度。

All modern computers, from smart phones to supercomputers, have multiple processing units. Since writing programs that effectively use these resources is notoriously difficult, many programming languages, displaying a wide variety of linguistic abstractions, have been created. The "right" set of abstractions depends on many factors, ranging from the nature of the application at hand, the sophistication of the programmer, and the degree of performance desired and effort required to achieve it. For this research, the intellectual merits are in the creation of tools and language specifications that support an ecosystem of parallel programming language abstractions. These are to be developed by independent parties and safely and automatically imported into a programmer's compiler so that programmers can pick and choose the language features that they feel best meet their needs. The project's broader significance and importance are in a transformative methodology and supporting tools for writing parallel programs, one which dramatically simplifies the development of new parallel programming and domain-specific language features because it allows researchers to focus their efforts on the design and implementation of new abstractions. By making it easier for programmers to use and experiment with new features, distributed as composeable language extensions, they can write performant and correct parallel programs with less effort.The proposed approach will use a specification of the C programming language based on context free grammars (for specifying concrete syntax) and attribute grammars (for specifying semantic analysis, optimization, and code generation). This defines the host language into which parallel programming language extensions are imported. Language extensions are also specified in these formalisms as they easily compose with the host language and other extensions. Modular analyses of the language extensions ensure that the composition of the programmer's chosen extensions will be successful and result in a working compiler that will not terminate abnormally. Of interest is the degree to which new and existing language abstractions can be realized in this composable approach to language extension.