Collaborative Research: PPoSS: Planning: Unifying Software and Hardware to Achieve Performant and Scalable Zero-cost Parallelism in the Heterogeneous Future

利用并行性是充分利用计算机系统的必要条件，因此也是大多数应用程序的内在要求。即使对专家来说，构建能够真正实现硬件性能的并行程序也是极具挑战性的。它需要牢牢掌握从最高水平到最低水平的各种概念，而这个范围正在迅速扩大。这个项目沿着两条线来应对这个挑战，“理论向下”和“建筑向上”。第一种是通过语言和算法来简化并行编程。第二行致力于通过编译器、操作系统和硬件加速并行程序。这个项目的新奇之处在于它将这两条线连接起来，而这两条线通常被研究界区别对待。统一的研究团队正在解决一个特定的子问题，调度，然后确定如何从它扩展。该项目的影响是使普通程序员能够以非常高级的方式对未来的并行系统进行编程，同时在机器上实现可能的性能。该项目研究了一种“中间表示输出”方法，使高级并行抽象可实现，从而可以零成本地使用它们。核心思想是扩展编译器的中间表示，使其既能捕获高级并行概念，又能捕获低级机器和操作系统结构，从而实现全栈优化。这个规划项目将充实这一概念，并为未来更大规模的努力奠定基础。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Exploiting parallelism is essential to making full use of computer systems, and thus is intrinsic to most applications. Building parallel programs that can truly achieve the performance the hardware is capable of is extremely challenging even for experts. It requires a firm grasp of concepts that range from the very highest level to the very lowest, and that range is rapidly expanding. This project approaches this challenge along two lines, "theory down" and "architecture up". The first strives to simplify parallel programming through languages and algorithms. The second line strives to accelerate parallel programs through compilers, operating systems, and the hardware. The project's novelty is to bridge these two lines, which are usually treated quite distinctly by the research community. The unified team of researchers is addressing a specific subproblem, scheduling, and then determining how to expand out from it. The project's impact is in making it possible for ordinary programmers to program future parallel systems in a very high-level way, yet achieve the performance possible on the machine.The project studies an "intermediate representation out" approach to making high-level parallel abstractions implementable so that they can be used with zero cost. A core idea is to expand the compiler's intermediate representation such that it can capture both high-level parallel concepts and low-level machine and operating system structures, thus allowing full stack optimization. This planning project will flesh out this concept and set the stage for a larger scale effort in the future.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.