Runtime correctness checking for emerging programming paradigms

Abstract

With rapidly increasing concurrency, the HPC community is looking for new parallel programming paradigms to make best use of current and up-coming machines. Under the Japanese CREST funding program, the post-petascale HPC project developed the XMP programming paradigm, a pragma-based partitioned global address space (PGAS) approach. Good tool support for debugging and performance analysis is crucial for the productivity and therefore acceptance of a new programming paradigm. In this work we investigate which properties of a parallel programing language specification may help tools to highlight correctness and performance issues or help to avoid common issues in parallel programming in the first place. In this paper we exercise these investigations on the example of XMP. We also investigate the question how to improve the reusability of existing correctness and performance analysis tools.