With the introduction of new parallel architectures like the cell and multicore chips from IBM, Intel, AMD, and ARM, as well as the petascale processing available for high-end computing, a larger number of programmers will need to write parallel codes. Adding the parallel control structure to the sequence, selection, and iterative control constructs increases the complexity of code development, which often results in increased development costs and decreased reliability.

SequenceL is a high-level programming language — that is, a programming language that is closer to a human’s way of thinking than to a machine’s. Historically, high-level languages have resulted in decreased development costs and increased reliability, at the expense of performance. In recent applications at JSC and in industry, SequenceL has demonstrated the usual advantages of high-level programming in terms of low cost and high reliability. SequenceL programs, however, have run at speeds typically comparable with, and in many cases faster than, their counterparts written in C and C++ when run on single-core processors. Moreover, SequenceL is able to generate parallel executables automatically for multicore hardware, gaining parallel speedups without any extra effort from the programmer beyond what is required to write the sequential/single-core code.

A SequenceL-to-C++ translator has been developed that automatically renders readable multithreaded C++ from a combination of a SequenceL program and sample data input. The SequenceL language is based on two fundamental computational laws, Consume-Simplify-Produce (CSP) and Normalize-Transpose (NT), which enable it to automate the creation of parallel algorithms from high-level code that has no annotations of parallelism whatsoever. In our anecdotal experience, SequenceL development has been in every case less costly than development of the same algorithm in sequential (that is, single-core, single process) C or C++, and an order of magnitude less costly than development of comparable parallel code. Moreover, SequenceL not only automatically parallelizes the code, but since it is based on CSP-NT, it is provably race free, thus eliminating the largest quality challenge the parallelized software developer faces.

Compiling functional code to C++ is not new. Compiling functional code to readable C++ that runs in parallel is much more of a challenge, and that was the majority of this effort. For current purposes in this effort, readability of the generated code is crucial, in case the human programmer wishes to add annotations, or to inspect the code for verification purposes. Moreover, by compiling to C++ it is assured that SequenceL can be used in any application where C++ could be used.

SequenceL has been found to discover all potential parallelisms automatically in relatively complex algorithms (involving multiple threads), and thus shows the potential to relieve more of the programmer’s cognitive load as the problem grows in complexity. SequenceL’s runtime environment then selects which parallelisms to actually exploit, with the aim of maximum overall speed when considering communication costs between processes.

This work was done by Daniel Cooke and J. Nelson Rushton of Texas Tech University for Goddard Space Flight Center. GSC-15859-1