Peta-scale systems have tens of thousands to millions of cores. To exploit the performance for applications such as climate prediction, environmental modeling, astrophysics, biology, life-sciences, etc, the problems of programming these systems must be solved. Programming language enhancements, compiler techniques and runtime support must be developed to enable computing and knowledge discovery at this unprecedented scale. The challenges faced by a user in programming these machines include performance, power, productivity, and portability, which are inter-related in a complex way.
This project entails the design and development of programming language, programming model, and compilation optimizations for I/O and storage performance and power optimizations. The project is investigating ?What minimal set of changes or enhancements to programming models, programming languages, and what optimizations to compilers and runtime systems are needed to enable better I/O, file and storage systems performance while optimizing power and improving productivity?? Some specific questions include: What language enhancements can be used by to specifically improve the I/O and storage performance? Should interfaces be developed that can be used across languages for I/O? What compiler optimizations are needed? Can the compiler identify transform codes that can inform the I/O runtime and storage systems on phases to power-down disks to save power at certain times as required? The project tasks include: the design and development of programming-language enhancement; the design of a compilation framework and performance- and power-oriented I/O optimizations using novel compiler analyses; and the design of a novel hint-handling mechanism within the I/O stack.
