Title
MSL: a synthesis enabled language for distributed implementations
Abstract
This paper demonstrates how ideas from generative programming and software synthesis can help support the development of bulk-synchronous distributed memory kernels. These ideas are realized in a new language called MSL, a C-like language that combines synthesis features with high level notations for array manipulation and bulk-synchronous parallelism to simplify the semantic analysis required for synthesis. The paper shows that by leveraging these high level notations, it is possible to scale the synthesis and automated bug-finding technologies that underlie MSL to realistic computational kernels. Specifically, we demonstrate the methodology through case studies implementing non-trivial distributed kernels---both regular and irregular---from the NAS parallel benchmarks. We show that our approach can automatically infer many challenging details from these benchmarks and can enable high level implementation ideas to be reused between similar kernels. We also demonstrate that these high level notations map easily to low level C code and show that the performance of this generated code matches that of handwritten Fortran.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/SC.2014.31
SC
Keywords
Field
DocType
array manipulation,nas parallel benchmark,msl language,code generation,c language,synthesis features,bulk-synchronous parallelism,parallel programming,computational kernels,synthesis enabled language,distributed memory systems,storage management,nontrivial distributed kernels,operating system kernels,bulk-synchronous distributed memory kernels,c-like language,semantic analysis,high level notations,program debugging,distributed implementation,software synthesis,automated bug-finding technology,generative programming,low level c code,fortran,program compilers,vectorization,geodynamics
Notation,Programming language,Computer science,Parallel computing,Fortran,Distributed memory,Vectorization (mathematics),Implementation,Constructed language,Software synthesis,Generative grammar,Distributed computing
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2167-4329
3
0.40
References 
Authors
38
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zhilei Xu118710.42
Shoaib Kamil266366.76
Armando Solar-Lezama379159.48