Higher-level parallelization for local and distributed asynchronous task-based programming
Hartmut Kaiser, Thomas C. Heller, Daniel Bourgeois, Dietmar Fey · 2015
One of the biggest challenges on the way to exascale computing is programmability in the context of performance portability. The efficient utilization of the prospective architectures of exascale supercomputers will be challenging in many ways, very much because of a massive increase of on-node parallelism, and an increase of complexity of memory hierarchies. Parallel programming models need to be able to formulate algorithms that allow exploiting these architectural peculiarities. The recent revival of interest in the industry and wider community for the C++ language has spurred a remarkable amount of standardization proposals and technical specifications. Among those efforts is the development of seamlessly integrating various types of parallelism, such as iterative parallel execution, task-based parallelism, asynchronous execution flows, continuation style computation, and explicit fork-join control flow of independent and non-homogeneous code paths. Those proposals are the foundation of a powerful high-level abstraction that allows C++ codes to deal with an ever increasing architectural complexity in recent hardware developments.