Published December 23, 2011 | Version v1
Journal article

ng: What next-generation languages can teach us about HENP frameworks in the manycore era

  • 1. Laboratoire de l'Accélérateur Linéaire, Université Paris-Sud XI, 91898, Orsay (France)

Description

Current High Energy and Nuclear Physics (HENP) frameworks were written before multicore systems became widely deployed. A 'single-thread' execution model naturally emerged from that environment, however, this no longer fits into the processing model on the dawn of the manycore era. Although previous work focused on minimizing the changes to be applied to the LHC frameworks (because of the data taking phase) while still trying to reap the benefits of the parallel-enhanced CPU architectures, this paper explores what new languages could bring to the design of the next-generation frameworks. Parallel programming is still in an intensive phase of R and D and no silver bullet exists despite the 30+ years of literature on the subject. Yet, several parallel programming styles have emerged: actors, message passing, communicating sequential processes, task-based programming, data flow programming, ... to name a few. We present the work of the prototyping of a next-generation framework in new and expressive languages (python and Go) to investigate how code clarity and robustness are affected and what are the downsides of using languages younger than FORTRAN/C/C++.

Availability note (English)

Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/331/4/042002

Additional details

Publishing Information

Journal Title
Journal of Physics. Conference Series (Online)
Journal Volume
331
Journal Issue
4
Journal Page Range
[6 p.]
ISSN
1742-6596

Conference

Title
International conference on computing in high energy and nuclear physics
Acronym
CHEP 2010
Dates
18-22 Oct 2010
Place
Taipei, Taiwan (China)