Event Report
Report author:
Chris Johnson
Event organiser(s):
Chris Johnson
Title of event:
Novel Parallel Programming Languages for HPC
Date of event:
18th June, 2008 – 1 day event
Target Audience:
HPC users and HPC language developers
Objectives:
Original objectives: “This will be a chance for researchers to present results on and discuss recent
developments in new parallel computing languages. The audience includes the UK HPC community
(ie the same audience as the seminar), but will also include members of the Computer Science
community who work on languages and compilers. Many of these languages are still under active
development and the workshop will be a valuable opportunity for users to discuss the languages with
their developers.”
Chronology of Event:
The webpages for this event can be found via the events section of the HPCx website:
http://www.hpcx.ac.uk/about/events/hpc_languages/index.html
The following talks were given at the Novel Parallel Programming Languages for HPC:
•
Introduction - David Henty, EPCC
David welcomed the delegates to the workshop and explained the itinerary for the rest of the
day.
•
Coarray Fortran - John Reid, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
John Reid introduced and explained the concepts behind Coarray Fortran giving an overview
of the language using examples of code as an illustration.
•
Chapel - Brad Chamberlain, Cray
Brad Chamberlain gave an introduction to Cray’s “Chapel” language explaining the approach
taken by Cray when designing the language. Examples of code were used to illustrate the talk
together with an example of a small application coded up in Chapel.
•
Fortress - Victor Luchangco, Sun Microsystems
Victor Luchangco gave an introduction to Sun’s “Fortress” language explaining how the
language is constructed giving examples of some benchmarks coded up in Fortress.
•
X10 – Vijay Saraswat, IBM
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This talk was given remotely by phone via a loud speaker in the lecture theatre. Vijay
Saraswat gave an introduction to IBM’s X10 language explaining how the language was
constructed together with some code examples.
•
Applications of UPC - Jason Beech-Brandt, Cray CoE
Jason Beech-Brandt gave an overview of the Unified Parallel C (UPC) language explaining
how the execution model worked and giving small examples of code. He then went on to give
an example of an engineering code written in UPC.
•
Object-Oriented Languages for HPC, Stephen Booth, EPCC
Stephen Booth explained how the Object-Oriented techniques could be used to aid the writing
of parallel codes.
•
User Discussion, chair: David Henty
The event concluded with a “panel” session where users were invited to ask questions to the
day’s speakers.
Event Achievements:
The "Novel Parallel Programming Languages for HPC" workshop took place on the day following the
HPCx Annual Seminar. Although a number of the participants attended both events, there were still a
number of people who attended this workshop independently. We were pleased with the overall
participation of this event with over sixty people attending – a much higher figure than we had
originally envisaged.
The workshop consisted of talks from vendors, language developers and researchers. The opening
speaker was John Reid of Rutherford Appleton Laboratory who gave an excellent talk on Coarray
Fortran. This was followed by interesting talks from language developers working on HPC languages
initially funded by the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) HPCS Program. This
session included talks on Chapel (Cray), Fortress (Sun) and X10 (IBM). In the afternoon there was a
talk on applications of UPC (Unified Parallel C) followed by a talk on the use of Object Oriented
Languages for HPC. All talks received a lot of interest and many questions were taken from the floor.
The event was rounded off with an open discussion on all the topics discussed during the day in which
all of the speakers present participated. In particular there was some discussion about whether or not
Coarray Fortran should be included as part of the Fortran 2008 standard, either as a part of the core
standard or as an optional part; a decision is due to be taken on this very soon and workshop
participants were invited to comment on this matter before the decision is taken shortly.
The event was considered as a great success and organisation was made very easy because of the
set-up at eSI. Registration, accommodation, expenses, catering, etc. were all organised by the team at
eSI and this together with the budget available for speakers made the event go very smoothly and
allowed us to invite top-quality speakers.
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