Abstract

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is the library-based programming model employed by most scalable parallel applications today; however, it is not easy to use. To simplify program development, Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages have emerged as promising alternatives to MPI. Co-array Fortran (CAF), Titanium, and Unified Parallel C are explicitly parallel single-program multiple-data languages that provide the abstraction of a global shared memory and enable programmers to use one-sided communication to access remote data. This thesis focuses on evaluating PGAS languages and explores new language features to simplify the development of high performance programs in CAF. To simplify program development, we explore extending CAF with abstractions for group, Cartesian, and graph communication topologies that we call co-spaces. The com-bination of co-spaces, textual barriers, and single values enables effective analysis and optimization of CAF programs. We present an algorithm for synchronization strength re-duction (SSR), which replaces textual barriers with faster point-to-point synchronization. This optimization is both difficult and error-prone for developers to perform manually.

Citations