A Productive and Scalable Actor-Based Programming System for PGAS Applications

The Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) model is well suited for executing irregular applications on cluster-based systems, due to its efficient support for short, one-sided messages. Separately, the actor model has been gaining popularity as a productive asynchronous message-passing approach for distributed objects in enterprise and cloud computing platforms, typically implemented in languages such as Erlang, Scala or Rust. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no past work on using the actor model to deliver both productivity and scalability to PGAS applications on clusters.

In this paper, we introduce a new programming system for PGAS applications, in which point-to-point remote operations can be expressed as fine-grained asynchronous actor messages. In this approach, the programmer does not need to worry about programming complexities related to message aggregation and termination detection. Our approach can also be viewed as extending the classical Bulk Synchronous Parallelism model with fine-grained asynchronous communications within a phase or superstep. We believe that our approach offers a desirable point in the productivity-performance space for PGAS applications, with more scalable performance and higher productivity relative to past approaches. Specifically, for seven irregular mini-applications from the Bale benchmark suite executed using 2048 cores in the NERSC Cori system, our approach shows geometric mean performance improvements of $\ge 20\times$ relative to standard PGAS versions (UPC and OpenSHMEM) while maintaining comparable productivity to those versions.