Ponnuswamy Sadayappan of Ohio State is supported by the Chemistry Division under the Information Technology Research (ITR) program to develop program synthesis tools that will facilitate high-performance parallel programming for electronic structure calculations. Co-PI's include Gerald Baumgartner and Russ Pitzer of Ohio State, Jagannathan Ramanujam of Louisiana State, and Marcel Nooijen of Princeton, (the latter two via collaborative proposals CHE-0121706 and CHE-0121383). This team of computer scientists and computational chemists will develop a tensor contraction engine that can synthesize efficient parallel code in Fortran or C from an input specification expressed in a high-level notation, for a number of target architectures. This tool will be made freely available to other developers of quantum chemistry software.
The development of high-performance parallel programs for scientific applications is complicated by the effects of algorithm choice on memory access costs and communication overhead. Currently available tools for software development and performance modeling/optimization do not provide adequate support to developers of scientific code. This research will provide a novel approach to the automated synthesis of high-performance parallel programs, with the particular emphasis on electronic structure codes widely employed in chemistry, physics, and materials science.
