HPCwire: HPCS Languages Move Forward: A Q&A with Rusty Lusk

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August 25, 2006

HPCS Languages Move Forward: A Q&A with Rusty Lusk

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In July, Oak Ridge National Laboratory hosted an HPCS (High-Productivity Computing System) Language Workshop to discuss the status of the next-generation HPC languages -- Chapel (Cray), X10 (IBM) and Fortress (Sun Microsystems) -- being developed by the three DARPA HPCS Phase II vendors. Workshop attendees discussed design and compiler/runtime implementation issues associated with the three entries as well as how the language component of HPCS would evolve as Phase II of the program comes to a conclusion.

HPCwire got the opportunity to ask Rusty Lusk, one of the HPCS Language Workshop principle organizers and the Acting Division Director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, about the current state of the HPCS language effort and about some of the challenges that lie ahead as the program enters Phase III.

HPCwire: The DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) project is set to enter Phase III soon. Can you tell us a bit about the language component of the project?

Rusty Lusk: DARPA's approach to increasing productivity in HPC application development involved both a new generation of machines and a new compute language, intended to work together. The language project has produced three prototypes: X10 from IBM, Fortress from Sun, and Chapel from Cray. Each contains innovative concepts designed to make it easer to write scalable parallel programs.

HPCwire: What is the current state of the HPCS languages: X10, Chapel, and Fortress?

Lusk: DARPA sponsored a small workshop this summer at which the three HPCS vendors -- Cray, IBM, and Sun -- presented frank reports on the current state of their language development projects. I was impressed by the progress each of them has made in the past year. They have moved beyond conceptual design to a nearly finalized syntax and are proceeding with implementation of the compiler, runtime libraries, and tools necessary to make a language viable.

They face a difficult challenge. Successful new languages are rare, and DARPA has commissioned these to take particular advantage of the HPCS machines, prototypes of which have not yet appeared. While these machines will provide hardware support for advanced languages such as these, there must also be a way to use the new languages on a wide class of parallel machines, or else a critical mass of users will never materialize.

HPCwire: What are the vendor plans for their languages through December 2007?

Lusk: DARPA is supporting all three independent language development efforts through the end of 2007, as the overall HPCS project transitions to Phase III. By the end of next year, the vendors expect to have final public versions of their syntax and semantics and to have prototype implementations available on current platforms so that applications can begin experimentation with them. These implementations may not provide every feature in the new languages, but they will enable application developers to get a feel for the extent to which the new languages enhance productivity.

HPCwire: What requirements do applications have for new programming languages?

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