Productivity and performance using partitioned global address space languages

Katherine Yelick, Parry Husbands, Costin Iancu, Amir Kamil, Rajesh Nishtala, Jimmy Su, Michael Welcome, Tong Wen, Dan Bonachea, Wei-Yu Chen, Phillip Colella, Kaushik Datta (+4 others)
2007 Proceedings of the 2007 international workshop on Parallel symbolic computation - PASCO '07  
Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages combine the programming convenience of shared memory with the locality and performance control of message passing. One such language, Unified Parallel C (UPC) is an extension of ISO C defined by a consortium that boasts multiple proprietary and open source compilers. Another PGAS language, Titanium, is a dialect of Java T M designed for high performance scientific computation. In this paper we describe some of the highlights of two related
more » ... ts, the Titanium project centered at U.C. Berkeley and the UPC project centered at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Both compilers use a source-to-source strategy that translates the parallel languages to C with calls to a communication layer called GASNet. The result is portable highperformance compilers that run on a large variety of shared and distributed memory multiprocessors. Both projects combine compiler, runtime, and application efforts to demonstrate some of the performance and productivity advantages to these languages.
doi:10.1145/1278177.1278183 dblp:conf/issac/YelickBCCDDGHHHIKNSWW07 fatcat:hpedjb24vvfkbpi7fbawt6xf4u