Technical reports:

Analysis of Clocks in X10 Programs (Extended)

Title:: Analysis of Clocks in X10 Programs (Extended)
Author(s):: Vasudevan, Nalini
Tardieu, Olivier
Dolby, Julian
Edwards, Stephen A.
Date:: 2008
Type:: Technical reports
Handle:: http://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:29608
Series:: Columbia University Computer Science Technical Reports
Abstract:: Clocks are a mechanism for providing synchronization barriers in concurrent programming languages. They are usually implemented using primitive communication mechanisms and thus spare the programmer from reasoning about low-level implementation details such as remote procedure calls and error conditions. Clocks provide flexibility, but programs often use them in specific ways that do not require their full implementation. In this paper, we describe a tool that mitigates the overhead of general-purpose clocks by statically analyzing how programs use them and choosing optimized implementations when available. We tackle the clock implementation in the standard library of the X10 programming language---a parallel, distributed object-oriented language. We report our findings for a small set of analyses and benchmarks. Our tool only adds a few seconds to analysis time, making it practical to use as part of a compilation chain.
Subject(s):: Computer science