Article

X10: an object-oriented approach to non-uniform cluster computing

Authors:

Vivek SarkarAuthors Info & Claims

OOPSLA '05: Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications

Pages 519 - 538

https://doi.org/10.1145/1094811.1094852

Published: 12 October 2005 Publication History

Get Access

Abstract

It is now well established that the device scaling predicted by Moore's Law is no longer a viable option for increasing the clock frequency of future uniprocessor systems at the rate that had been sustained during the last two decades. As a result, future systems are rapidly moving from uniprocessor to multiprocessor configurations, so as to use parallelism instead of frequency scaling as the foundation for increased compute capacity. The dominant emerging multiprocessor structure for the future is a Non-Uniform Cluster Computing (NUCC) system with nodes that are built out of multi-core SMP chips with non-uniform memory hierarchies, and interconnected in horizontally scalable cluster configurations such as blade servers. Unlike previous generations of hardware evolution, this shift will have a major impact on existing software. Current OO language facilities for concurrent and distributed programming are inadequate for addressing the needs of NUCC systems because they do not support the notions of non-uniform data access within a node, or of tight coupling of distributed nodes.We have designed a modern object-oriented programming language, X10, for high performance, high productivity programming of NUCC systems. A member of the partitioned global address space family of languages, X10 highlights the explicit reification of locality in the form of places}; lightweight activities embodied in async, future, foreach, and ateach constructs; a construct for termination detection (finish); the use of lock-free synchronization (atomic blocks); and the manipulation of cluster-wide global data structures. We present an overview of the X10 programming model and language, experience with our reference implementation, and results from some initial productivity comparisons between the X10 and Java™ languages.

References

[1]

Sudhir Ahuja, Nicholas Carriero, and David Gelernter. Linda and friends. IEEE Computer, 19(8):26--34, August 1986.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[2]

Eric Allan, David Chase, Victor Luchangco, Jan-Willem Maessen, Sukyoung Ryu, Guy L. Steele Jr., and Sam Tobin-Hochstadt. The Fortress language specification version 0.618. Technical report, Sun Microsystems, April 2005.

Google Scholar

[3]

Yariv Aridor, Michael Factor, and Avi Teperman. cJVM: A single system image of a JVM on a cluster. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP'99), pages 4--11, September 1999.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[4]

Henri E. Bal and M. Frans Kaashoek. Object distribution in Orca using compile-time and run-time techniques. In Proceedings of the Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA'93), pages 162--177, November 1993.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[5]

Ray Barriuso and Allan Knies. SHMEM user's guide. Technical report, Cray Inc. Research, May 1994.

Google Scholar

[6]

John K. Bennett, John B. Carter, and Willy Zwaenepoel. Munin: Distributed shared memory based on type specific memory coherence. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL'95), pages 168--176, March 1990.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[7]

Hans Boehm. Threads cannot be implemented as a library. In Proceedings of the Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI'05), pages 261--268, June 2005.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[8]

Luca Cardelli. A language with distributed scope. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL'95), pages 286--297, January 1995.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[9]

Calin Cascaval, Evelyn Duesterwald, Peter F. Sweeney, and Robert W. Wisniewski. Multiple page size modeling and optimization. In Proceedings of the Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT'05), September 2005.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[10]

IBM International Technical Support Organization Poughkeepsie Center. Overview of lapi. Technical report sg24-2080-00, chapter 10, IBM, December 1997. www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg242080.pdf.

Google Scholar

[11]

Bradford L. Chamberlain, Sung-Eun Choi, Steven J. Deitz, and Lawrence Snyder. The high-level parallel language ZPL improves productivity and performance. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Workshop on Productivity and Performance in High-End Computing, 2004.

Google Scholar

[12]

Elaine Cheong, Judy Liebman, Jie Liu, and Feng Zhao. TinyGALS: A Programming model for event-driven embedded systems. In Proceedings of 2003 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, 2003.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[13]

Brian Chin, Shane Markstrum, and Todd Millstein. Semantic type qualifiers. In Proceedings of the Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI'05), pages 85--95, June 2005.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[14]

CILK-5.3 reference manual. Technical report, Supercomputing Technologies Group, June 2000.

Google Scholar

[15]

F. Darema, D.A. George, V.A. Norton, and G.F. Pfister. A Single-Program-Multiple-Data Computational model for EPEX/FORTRAN. Parallel Computing, 7(1):11--24, 1988.

Crossref

Google Scholar

[16]

Kemal Ebcioc glu, Vijay Saraswat, and Vivek Sarkar. X10: Programming for hierarchical parallelism and nonuniform data access (extended abstract). In Language Runtimes '04 Workshop: Impact of Next Generation Processor Architectures On Virtual Machines (colocated with OOPSLA 2004), October 2004. www.aurorasoft.net/workshops/lar04/lar04home.htm.

Google Scholar

[17]

Kemal Ebcioc glu, Vijay Saraswat, and Vivek Sarkar. X10: an experimental language for high productivity programming of scalable systems (extended abstract). In Workshop on Productivity and Performance in High-End Computing (P-PHEC), February 2005.

Google Scholar

[18]

ECMA. Standard ecma-334: C} language specification. http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ecma-st/Ecma-334.pdf, December 2002.

Google Scholar

[19]

Tarek El-Ghazawi, William W. Carlson, and Jesse M. Draper. UPC Language Specification v1.1.1, October 2003.

Google Scholar

[20]

High Performance Fortran Forum. High performance fortran language specification version 2.0. Technical report, Rice University Houston, TX, October 1996.

Google Scholar

[21]

Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman. The Globus toolkit. The Grid: Blueprint of a New Computing Infrastructure, pages 259--278, 1998.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[22]

Basilio B. Fraquela, Jia Guo, Ganesh Bikshandi, Maria J. Garzaran, Gheorghe Almasi, Jose Moreira, and David Padua. The hierarchically tiled arrays programming approach. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Languages, Compilers, and Runtime Support for Scalable Systems (LCR'04), pages 1--12, 2004.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[23]

Al Geist, Adam Beguelin, Jack Dongarra, Weicheng Jiang, Robert Manchek, and Vaidy Sunderam. PVM -- Parallel Virtual Machine: A Users' Guide and Tutorial for Networked Parallel Computing. MIT Press, 1994.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[24]

James Gosling, Bill Joy, Guy Steele, and Gilad Bracha. The Java Language Specification. Addison Wesley, 2000.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[25]

Robert H. Halstead. MULTILISP: A language for concurrent symbolic computation. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 7(4):501--538, 1985.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[26]

Per Brinch Hansen. Structured multiprogramming. CACM, 15(7), July 1972.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[27]

Timothy Harris and Keir Fraser. Language support for lightweight transactions. In Proceedings of the Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA'03), pages 388--402, October 2003.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[28]

Matthias Hauswirth, Peter F. Sweeney, Amer Diwan, and Michael Hind. Vertical profiling: Understanding the behavior of object oriented applications. In Proceedings of the Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA'04), October 2004.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[29]

Maurice Herlihy. Wait-free synchronization. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 13(1):124--149, January 1991.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[30]

Paul Hilfinger, Dan Bonachea, David Gay, Susan Graham, Ben Liblit, Geoff Pike, and Katherine Yelick. Titanium Language Reference Manual. Technical Report CSD-01-1163, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, Ca, USA, 2001.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[31]

C.A.R. Hoare. Monitors: An operating system structuring concept. CACM, 17(10):549--557, October 1974.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[32]

HPC challenge benchmark. http://icl.cs.utk.edu/hpcc/.

Google Scholar

[33]

HPL Workshop on High Productivity Programming Models and Languages, May 2004. http://hplws.jpl.nasa.gov/.

Google Scholar

[34]

Cray Inc. The Chapel language specification version 0.4. Technical report, Cray Inc., February 2005.

Google Scholar

[35]

The Java Grande Forum benchmark suite. http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/javagrande/javag.html.

Google Scholar

[36]

The Java RMI Specification. http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/rmi/.

Google Scholar

[37]

Arvind Krishnamurthy, David E. Culler, Andrea Dusseau, Seth C. Goldstein, Steven Lumetta, Thorsten von Eicken, and Katherine Yelick. Parallel programming in Split-C. In Proceedings of the 1993 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing, pages 262 -- 273, 1993.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[38]

L. Lamport. How to make a multiprocessor computer that correctly executes multiprocess programs. IEEE Transactions on Computers, 28(9), 1979.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[39]

Doug Lea. Concurrent Programming in Java, Second Edition. Addison-Wesley, Inc., Reading, Massachusetts, 1999.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[40]

Doug Lea. The Concurreny Utilities, 2001. JSR 166, http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=166.

Google Scholar

[41]

Maged M. Michael and Michael L. Scott. Simple, fast, and practical non-blocking and blocking concurrent queue algorithms. In PODC '96: Proceedings of the fifteenth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing, pages 267--275. ACM Press, 1996.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[42]

Jose Moreira, Samuel Midkiff, and Manish Gupta. A comparison of three approaches to language, compiler, and library support for multidimensional arrays in Java computing. In Proceedings of the ACM Java Grande - ISCOPE 2001 Conference, June 2001.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[43]

Jose E. Moreira, Samuel P. Midkiff, Manish Gupta, Pedro V. Artigas, Marc Snir, and Richard D. Lawrence. Java programming for high-performance numerical computing. IBM Systems Journal, 39(1):21--, 2000.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[44]

Robert W. Numrich and John Reid. Co-Array Fortran for parallel programming. ACM SIGPLAN Fortran Forum Archive, 17:1--31, August 1998.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[45]

Nathaniel Nystrom, Michael R. Clarkson, and Andrew C. Myers. Polyglot: An extensible compiler framework for Java. In Proceedings of the Conference on Compiler Construction (CC'03), pages 1380--152, April 2003.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[46]

OpenMP specifications. http://www.openmp.org/specs.

Google Scholar

[47]

Vijay Saraswat and Radha Jagadeesan. Concurrent clustered programming. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR'05), August 2005.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[48]

Vijay Saraswat, Radha Jagadeesan, Armando Solar-Iezama, and Christoph von Praun. Determinate imperative programming: A clocked interpretetation of imperative syntax. Submitted for publication, available at http://www.saraswat.org/cf.html, September 2005.

Google Scholar

[49]

V. Sarkar and G. R. Gao. Analyzable atomic sections: Integrating fine-grained synchronization and weak consistency models for scalable parallelism. Technical report, CAPSL Technical Memo 52, February 2004.

Google Scholar

[50]

Vivek Sarkar, Clay Williams, and Kemal Ebcioc glu. Application development productivity challenges for high-end computing. In Workshop on Productivity and Performance in High-End Computing (P-PHEC), February 2004. http://www.research.ibm.com/arl/pphec/pphec2004-proceedings.pdf.

Google Scholar

[51]

Anthony Skjellum, Ewing Lusk, and William Gropp. Using MPI: Portable Parallel Programming with the Message Passing Iinterface. MIT Press, 1999.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[52]

Lorna A. Smith and J. Mark Bull. A multithreaded java grande benchmark suite. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Java for High Performance Computing, June 2001.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[53]

Lorna A. Smith, J. Mark Bull, and Jan Obdrzalek. A parallel Java Grande benchmark suite. In Proceedings of Supercomputing 2001, Denver, Colorado, November 2001.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[54]

Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). SPECjbb2000 (java business benchmark). http://www.spec.org/jbb2000.

Google Scholar

[55]

Thorsten von Eicken, David E. Culler, Seth C. Goldstein, and Klaus E. Schauser. Active messages: a mechanism for integrated communication and computation. In Proceedings of the Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA'92), pages 256--266, May 1992.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[56]

Robert W. Wisniewski, Peter F. Sweeney, Kartik Sudeep, Matthias Hauswirth, Evelyn Duesterwald, Calin Cascaval, and Reza Azimi. Performance and Environment Monitoring for Whole-System Characterization and Optimization. In Conference on Power/Performance interaction with Architecture,Circuits, and Compilers, 2004.

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

Kouatly RKhan T(2024)Performance of Text-Independent Automatic Speaker Recognition on a Multicore SystemTsinghua Science and Technology10.26599/TST.2023.901001829:2(447-456)Online publication date: Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.26599/TST.2023.9010018
Abdi JPosluns GZhang GWang BJeffrey MAgrawal KPetrank E(2024)When Is Parallelism Fearless and Zero-Cost with Rust?Proceedings of the 36th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures10.1145/3626183.3659966(27-40)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3626183.3659966
Blelloch GGu YSun Y(2024)Teaching Parallel Algorithms Using the Binary-Forking Model2024 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW)10.1109/IPDPSW63119.2024.00080(346-351)Online publication date: 27-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/IPDPSW63119.2024.00080
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

X10: an object-oriented approach to non-uniform cluster computing
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Distributed computing methodologies
    1. Distributed programming languages
  2. Parallel computing methodologies
    1. Parallel programming languages
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Concurrent programming structures
      2. Language types
        Concurrent programming languages
        Distributed programming languages
        Object oriented languages
        Parallel programming languages

Recommendations

Parallel computing with x10
IWMSE '08: Proceedings of the 1st international workshop on Multicore software engineering

Many problems require parallel solutions and implementations and how to extract and specify parallelism has been the focus of Research during the last few decades. While there has been a significant progress in terms of (a)automatically deriving ...
X10: an object-oriented approach to non-uniform cluster computing
Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications

It is now well established that the device scaling predicted by Moore's Law is no longer a viable option for increasing the clock frequency of future uniprocessor systems at the rate that had been sustained during the last two decades. As a result, ...
Local parallel iteration in x10
X10 2015: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on X10

X10 programs have achieved high efficiency on petascale clusters by making significant use of parallelism between places, however, there has been less focus on exploiting local parallelism within a place. This paper introduces a standard mechanism - ...

Reviews

Reviewer: Henk Sips

The authors present X10, an object-oriented language designed and implemented to address the requirements of non-uniform cluster computing platforms (NUCC): tile-based architectures having multicore symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) tiles (nodes) with non-uniform memory hierarchies. X10 increases NUCC programming productivity by facilitating the design, implementation, and deployment of safe, analyzable, scalable, and flexible parallel high-performance computing (HPC) applications. X10 is based on a novel combination of design decisions: a new programming model, reflected in a Java-based programming language, using a partitioned global address space (PGAS) model with explicit locality; specific concurrency constructs for task parallelism; and dedicated array constructs for data parallelism. The prototype implementation is entirely based on Java: X10 is translated to Java code and executed on a single unmodified Java Virtual Machine (JVM) (current version) or on a multi-JVM environment (under development). The code productivity analysis is done by comparing the parallelizations of eight benchmarks from the Java Grande Benchmark Suite in both X10 and Java. For the code size metrics considered, X10 gives better results. The benchmark performance is not analyzed, probably because the prototype X10 implementation (the full chain is due in 2010) is now mainly targeted to language design evaluation and not to performance. The main contribution of the paper is the presentation of X10 as a distinctive option among the HPC languages, due to its attempts at a coherent design (not building on legacy code); object-oriented approach; and novel constructs for locality, synchronization, data and task parallelism. Despite the numerous technical details, which may hinder readability, the authors have succeeded in proving X10 as a productive solution for programming NUCC platforms. Of course, they still have to prove that productivity and performance will go together, because that will determine in the end whether new paradigms and languages will be accepted by the HPC community. Online Computing Reviews Service

Access critical reviews of Computing literature here

Become a reviewer for Computing Reviews.

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

OOPSLA '05: Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications

October 2005

562 pages

ISBN:1595930310

DOI:10.1145/1094811

Conference Chairs:
Ralph Johnson
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL
,
Elisa Baniassad
Chinese University of Hong Kong
,
Program Chairs:
Richard P. Gabriel
Sun Microsystems Laboratories
,
James Noble
Victoria University of Wellington
,
Brian Marick
Exampler Consulting

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 40, Issue 10
Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications
October 2005
531 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/1103845
Issue’s Table of Contents

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]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 12 October 2005

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

OOPSLA05

Sponsor:

OOPSLA05: ACM SIGPLAN Object Oriented Programming Systems and Applications Conference

October 16 - 20, 2005

CA, San Diego, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 268 of 1,244 submissions, 22%

Upcoming Conference

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

1,205
Total Citations
View Citations
3,720
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)53
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)6

Reflects downloads up to 11 Aug 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

Kouatly RKhan T(2024)Performance of Text-Independent Automatic Speaker Recognition on a Multicore SystemTsinghua Science and Technology10.26599/TST.2023.901001829:2(447-456)Online publication date: Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.26599/TST.2023.9010018
Abdi JPosluns GZhang GWang BJeffrey MAgrawal KPetrank E(2024)When Is Parallelism Fearless and Zero-Cost with Rust?Proceedings of the 36th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures10.1145/3626183.3659966(27-40)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3626183.3659966
Blelloch GGu YSun Y(2024)Teaching Parallel Algorithms Using the Binary-Forking Model2024 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW)10.1109/IPDPSW63119.2024.00080(346-351)Online publication date: 27-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/IPDPSW63119.2024.00080
Castañeda APiña M(2024)Read/write fence-free work-stealing with multiplicityJournal of Parallel and Distributed Computing10.1016/j.jpdc.2023.104816186:COnline publication date: 1-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.jpdc.2023.104816
Salvaneschi GWeisenburger P(2024)Bridging Between Active Objects: Multitier Programming for Distributed, Concurrent SystemsActive Object Languages: Current Research Trends10.1007/978-3-031-51060-1_4(92-122)Online publication date: 29-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51060-1_4
Luo QLiu SHuang JLi J(2024)M‐DFCPP: A runtime library for multi‐machine dataflow computingConcurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience10.1002/cpe.8248Online publication date: 7-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.1002/cpe.8248
Jin EAmin NZhang Y(2023)Extensible Metatheory Mechanization via Family PolymorphismProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35912867:PLDI(1608-1632)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3591286
Arora JWestrick SAcar U(2023)Efficient Parallel Functional Programming with EffectsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35912847:PLDI(1558-1583)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3591284
Lehmann NGeller AVazou NJhala R(2023)Flux: Liquid Types for RustProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35912837:PLDI(1533-1557)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3591283
Muller SSinger KKeeney DNeth AAgrawal KLee IAcar U(2023)Responsive Parallelism with SynchronizationProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35912497:PLDI(712-735)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3591249
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Parallel computing with x10