Article

An evaluation of global address space languages: co-array fortran and unified parallel C

Authors:

Cristian Coarfa,

John Mellor-Crummey,

François Cantonnet,

Tarek El-Ghazawi,

Ashrujit Mohanti,

Daniel Chavarría-MirandaAuthors Info & Claims

PPoPP '05: Proceedings of the tenth ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming

June 2005

Pages 36 - 47

https://doi.org/10.1145/1065944.1065950

Published: 15 June 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Co-array Fortran (CAF) and Unified Parallel C (UPC) are two emerging languages for single-program, multiple-data global address space programming. These languages boost programmer productivity by providing shared variables for inter-process communication instead of message passing. However, the performance of these emerging languages still has room for improvement. In this paper, we study the performance of variants of the NAS MG, CG, SP, and BT benchmarks on several modern architectures to identify challenges that must be met to deliver top performance. We compare CAF and UPC variants of these programs with the original Fortran+MPI code. Today, CAF and UPC programs deliver scalable performance on clusters only when written to use bulk communication. However, our experiments uncovered some significant performance bottlenecks of UPC codes on all platforms. We account for the root causes limiting UPC performance such as the synchronization model, the communication efficiency of strided data, and source-to-source translation issues. We show that they can be remedied with language extensions, new synchronization constructs, and, finally, adequate optimizations by the back-end C compilers.

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Index Terms

An evaluation of global address space languages: co-array fortran and unified parallel C
1. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Performance
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Concurrent programming structures
      2. Language types
        Concurrent programming languages
        Distributed programming languages
        Parallel programming languages

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

PPoPP '05: Proceedings of the tenth ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming

June 2005

310 pages

ISBN:1595930809

DOI:10.1145/1065944

General Chair:
Keshav Pingali
Cornell University
,
Program Chairs:
Katherine Yelick
University of California, Berkeley and LBNL
,
Andrew Grimshaw
University of Virginia

Copyright © 2005 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 15 June 2005

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PPoPP05

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PPoPP05: ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming 2005

June 15 - 17, 2005

IL, Chicago, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 230 of 1,014 submissions, 23%

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https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-17-4135-2024
Tauro BSuchy BCampanoni SDinda PHale KTsafrir DMUSUVATHI MGupta RAbu-Ghazaleh N(2024)TrackFM: Far-out Compiler Support for a Far Memory WorldProceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 110.1145/3617232.3624856(401-419)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2024
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