Towards an Abstraction-Friendly Programming Model for High Productivity and High Performance Computing

Conference · Tue Oct 13 04:00:00 EDT 2009

OSTI ID:967752

Liao, C. ^[1]; Quinlan, D. ^[1]; Panas, T. ^[1]

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1. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)

General purpose languages, such as C++, permit the construction of various high-level abstractions to hide redundant, low-level details and accelerate programming productivity. Example abstractions include functions, data structures, classes, templates and so on. However, the use of abstractions significantly impedes static code analyses and optimizations, including parallelization, applied to the abstraction's complex implementations. As a result, there is a common perception that performance is inversely proportional to the level of abstraction. On the other hand, programming large scale, possibly heterogeneous high-performance computing systems is notoriously difficult, and programmers are less likely to abandon the help from high level abstractions when solving real-world, complex problems. Therefore, the need for programming models balancing both programming productivity and execution performance has reached a new level of criticality.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Nuclear Criticality Safety Program (NCSP)
• DOE Contract Number: AC52-07NA27344
• OSTI ID: 967752
• Report Number(s): LLNL--CONF-417691
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
COMPUTERS
CONSTRUCTION
CRITICALITY
Nuclear Criticality Safety Program (NCSP)
OPTIMIZATION
PERFORMANCE
PRODUCTIVITY
PROGRAMMING
SPECIFICATIONS