Mon May 12, 2008, 12:00-1:50, 9436 Boelter Hall

APGAS: Programming for concurrency and distribution

Vijay Saraswat
IBM Research

Multicore. Clusters. Accelerators. Network Processors. Welcome to the
new world of computing. For the last few years we have been developing
a new programming model to support the transition of programming from
the predominantly sequential world of the last fifty years to the
predominantly concurrent world of the future. The programming model --
the Asynchronous Partitioned Global Address Space (APGAS) model --
extends the conventional notion of single-threaded programs operating
against a single heap to the notion of asynchronous programs operating
in a collection of heterogeneous places. We show that a very few
constructs -- places, tasks, atomicity, finish -- are adequate to
program efficiently and productively in the new world. These
constructs can be realized in the Java family of languages (leading to
X10),  and in the C and Fortran family, leading to asynchronous
versions of UPC and Co-Array Fortran respectively. We outline the
research agenda we are pursuing to develop these languages -- and the
runtime libraries on which they are based -- and applications on these
languages.

This talk is based on joint work with several colleagues at IBM and elsewhere.

Host: Todd Millstein