Developer Productivity in HPC Application Development: An Overview of Recent Techniques

Abstract

Increasing computing power with evolving hardware architectures has lead to change in programming paradigm from serial to parallel. Unlike the sequential counterpart, application building for High Performance Computing (HPC) is extremely challenging for developers. In order to improve the programmer productivity, it is necessary to address the challenges such as: i) How to abstract the hardware and low level complexities to make programming easier? ii) What features should a design assistance tool have to simplify application development? iii) How should the programming languages be enhanced for HPC? iv) What sort of prediction techniques can be developed to assist programmers to predict potential speedup? v) Can refactoring techniques solve the issue of parallelizing existing serial code? In this talk we make an attempt to present a landscape of the existing approaches to assist the software building process in HPC from a developer's point of view, and highlight some important research questions. We also discuss the state of practice in the industry and some of the application specific tools developed for HPC.