Programmability of the HPCS Languages: A case study with a quantum chemistry kernel
Shet, A.G.; Elwasif, W.R.; Harrison, R.J.; Bernholdt, D.E.
Parallel and Distributed Processing, 2008. IPDPS 2008. IEEE International Symposium on
Volume , Issue , 14-18 April 2008 Page(s):1 - 8
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/IPDPS.2008.4536191
Summary:As high-end computer systems present users with rapidly increasing numbers of processors, possibly also incorporating attached co-processors, programmers are increasingly challenged to express the necessary levels of concurrency with the dominant parallel programming model, Fortran+MPI+OpenMP (or minor variations). In this paper, we examine the languages developed under the DARPA High-Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program (Chapel, Fortress, and XIO) as representatives of a different parallel programming model which might be more effective on emerging high-performance systems. The application used in this study is the Hartree-Fock method from quantum chemistry, which combines access to distributed data with a task-parallel algorithm and is characterized by significant irregularity in the computational tasks. We present several different implementation strategies for load balancing of the task-parallel computation, as well as distributed array operations, in each of the three languages. We conclude that the HPCS languages provide a wide variety of mechanisms for expressing parallelism, which can be combined at multiple levels, making them quite expressive for this problem.
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