LaR-2005 (4th International Workshop on Language Runtimes): Validating Next Generation Multicore Programming Models Session: LaR 2005 (4th International Workshop on Language Runtimes) Event Type: Workshop Time: 8:30am - 5:00pm Speaker(s): Yahya Mirza Location: 602-604 Abstract: The DARPA HPCS effort has been tasked with increasing programmer productivity while enabling petascale computing. With the utilization of multicore processors by game consoles, parallel programming will finally become mainstream. Recently, there has been research targeting existing parallel programming models like OpenMP and MPI to multicore architectures. Unfortunately, opinions differ on the utility of this approach. Consequently, emerging multi-level parallel solutions like Cray’s Chapel, Sun’s Fortress, and IBM’s X10 provide new opportunities in both scalable parallelism and high levels of programmer abstraction. To validate the productivity of these new solutions, we need to dig deeper than their obvious syntactic differences. We will need to understand the core semantics of their respective solutions, their similarities, and differences. Additionally, metrics such as how these solutions manage complexity, ease of use, simplicity, and expressibility need to be evaluated. Furthermore, the impact of the programming environment and code reuse on the amount of new code that has to be written needs to be discussed. Finally, we will need an understanding of how all these productivity features of the proposed solutions impact their runtime performance characteristics. To ground our discussion, and enable a meaningful comparative analysis, our workshop proposes that a single set of non-trivial algorithms be implemented multiple times in each of the HPCS languages, the DARPA PCA stream languages, and others. The goal of LaR-05 is to take a users perspective and discuss in a relaxed setting the pragmatic usability of the programming solutions being designed for scalable next generation multicore computing architectures. Chair/Speaker Details: Yahya Mirza Aurora Borealis Software LLC