CAREER: An Adaptive, High-Performance Software Infrastructure for Hierarchical Systems

并行计算机体系结构中的数据层次结构——即对计算机内存不同区域的不同访问速度——正变得越来越复杂。具有多个内存级别的机器，包括缓存一致非统一内存架构（CC-NUMA）和工作站集群，现在主导着超级计算。在不久的将来，科学和工业中的所有高性能并行架构都将是分层系统，成功开发一种通用的方法来编程这些机器是势在必行的。不幸的是，虽然等级制度并不新鲜，但研究界尚未开发出一种通用和全面的方法来研究它们。幸运的是，快速下降的处理能力成本以及动态编译和运行时支持方面的最新发展可能会解决这个问题，这在以前是不可能的。该项目将构建一个软件基础设施，利用这些因素在分层系统上交付高水平的应用程序性能。该基础设施将支持计算科学的进步，作为未来商业系统的模型，并作为教育和向学生展示并行性和内存层次结构的显式管理的工具。通过与国家超级计算应用中心的合作，它还将为分层系统开发各种高性能的科学和非科学代码。从技术上讲,该项目采用四种方法来解决层次问题：一个抽象资源分配和管理问题的层次虚拟机，一个通过调整应用程序的通信和同步操作来提供非层次系统幻觉的层次感知运行时系统，一个语言构造和动态编译器支持来调整应用程序的行为以适应层次结构的应用程序，一个展示框架价值的应用程序获得其他来源的支持以及本奖项。

Data hierarchies - that is, different access speeds for different areas of computer memory - in parallel computer architectures are becoming increasingly complex. Machines with several levels of memory, including cache-coherent non-uniform memory architectures (CC-NUMA) and clusters of workstations, now dominate supercomputing. In the near future, all high-performance parallel architectures in both science and industry will be hierarchical systems, and the successful development of a general-purpose approach to programming these machines is imperative. Unfortunately, although hierarchical systems are not new, the research community has not yet developed a general and comprehensive approach to them. Fortunately, rapidly decreasing cost of processing power and recent developments in dynamic compilation and runtime support may allow solutions to this problem that were not possible before. This project will build a software infrastructure that exploits those factors to deliver high levels of application performance on hierarchical systems. The infrastructure will support the advance of computational science, serve as a model for future commercial systems, and serve as a tool to educate and expose students to explicit management of parallelism and memory hierarchies. Through collaborations with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications it will also produce a wide range of high-performance scientific and non-scientific codes developed for hierarchical systems.Technically, the project approaches the hierarchy problem with a 4-pronged attack:-A hierarchical virtual machine that abstracts resource allocation and management issues -A hierarchy-aware runtime system that offers the illusion of a non-hierarchical system by adapting an application's communication and synchronization operations-Language constructs and dynamic compiler support to tune application behavior to the hierarchy-Applications that demonstrate the value of the frameworkParts of this approach will receive support from other sources as well as this award.