Software Tools for the Design and Tuning of Parallel Supercomputer Applications

高性能计算机设计的当前趋势表明，并行处理是提供解决现代科学和工程所面临的计算问题所需的速度的唯一途径。如果没有自动化和交互式并行化工具的帮助，期望程序员能够成功地编写各种并行架构是不合理的。这个项目将设计软件工具，帮助程序员开发新的程序，可能是通过重组现有的程序，在一个或多个并行架构上有效地运行。这项工作涉及三个相关工具或工具集的设计和原型设计：(1)并行程序性能评估工具，(2)自动或交互式并行Lisp程序的工具集，以及(3)并行程序的可移植运行时环境。这项研究的直接影响将是为并行架构开发新程序所需的时间将减少，并行架构上运行的程序的效率将提高。此外，由于开发新程序所需的时间更少，因此可以更快地测试新的体系结构思想和新的并行处理器，并减少程序员的工作量。这可能反过来导致并行体系结构的更快改进。

Current trends in high performance computer design indicate that parallel processing is the only way to deliver the speed needed to tackle the computational problems confronted by modern science and engineering. It is not reasonable to expect that programmers can successfully program the variety of parallel architectures being proposed without the assistance of automated and interactive parallelization tools. This project will design software tools that help the programmer develop new programs, perhaps by restructuring existing programs, that run efficiently on one or more parallel architectures. The work concerns the design and prototyping of three related tools or sets of tools: (1) a tool for parallel program performance estimation, (2) a set of tools for automatically or interactively parallelizing Lisp programs, and (3) a portable run-time environment for parallelized programs. The direct impact of this research will be that the time required to develop new programs for parallel architectures will decrease and the efficiency of programs running on parallel architectures will increase. Furthermore, because less time will be required to develop new programs it will be possible to test out new architectural ideas and new parallel processors more quickly and with less programmer effort. This may in turn lead to more rapid improvements in parallel architectures.