research-article

Comparing the usability of library vs. language approaches to task parallelism

Authors:

Zoran Budimlić,

Vivek SarkarAuthors Info & Claims

PLATEAU '10: Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools

Article No.: 9, Pages 1 - 6

https://doi.org/10.1145/1937117.1937126

Published: 17 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we compare the usability of a library approach with a language approach to task parallelism. There are many practical advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. A key advantage of a library-based approach is that it can be deployed without requiring any change in the tool chain, including compilers and IDEs. However, the use of library APIs to express all aspects of task parallelism can lead to code that is hard to understand and modify. A key advantage of a language-based approach is that the intent of the programmer is easier to express and understand, both by other programmers and by program analysis tools. However, a language-based approach usually requires the standardization of new constructs and (possibly) of new keywords. In this paper, we compare the java.util.concurrent (j.u.c) library [14] from Java 7 and the Habanero-Java (HJ) [16] language, supported by our experiences in teaching both models at Rice University.

References

[1]

Guy Blelloch. NESL: A Nested Data-Parallel Language. Technical Report CMU-CS-92-103, Carnegie Mellon University, January 1992.

Digital Library

[2]

Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat. Mapreduce: simplified data processing on large clusters. Commun. ACM, 51(1):107--113, 2008. ISSN 0001-0782.

Digital Library

[3]

Kemal Ebcioglu, Vivek Sarkar, Tarek El-Ghazawi, and John Urbanic. An experiment in measuring the productivity of three parallel programming languages. In Workshop on Productivity and Performance in High-End Computing (P-PHEC), 2006.

[4]

J. Shirako et al. Phasers: a unified deadlock-free construct for collective and point-to-point synchronization. In ICS '08, pages 277--288, New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM.

Digital Library

[5]

J. Shirako et al. Chunking parallel loops in the presence of synchronization. In ICS '09, pages 181--192, New York, NY, USA, 2009. ACM.

Digital Library

[6]

J. Shirako et al. Phaser accumulators: A new reduction construct for dynamic parallelism. In IPDPS '09, pages 1--12, Washington, DC, USA, 2009. IEEE Computer Society.

Digital Library

[7]

K. Yelick et al. Productivity and performance using partitioned global address space languages. In Proceedings of the international workshop on Parallel symbolic computation, pages 24--32, New York, NY, USA, 2007. ACM.

Digital Library

[8]

Matteo Frigo et al. The implementation of the Cilk-5 multithreaded language. In PLDI'98, pages 212--223, June 1998. Proceedings published ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 33, No. 5, May, 1998.

Digital Library

[9]

P. Charles et al. X10: an object-oriented approach to non-uniform cluster computing. In OOPSLA'05, pages 519--538, New York, NY, USA, 2005. ISBN 1-59593-031-0.

Digital Library

[10]

R. D. Blumofe et al. CILK: An efficient multithreaded runtime system. PPoPP'95, pages 207--216, July 1995.

Digital Library

[11]

Y. Guo et al. Slaw: a scalable locality-aware adaptive work-stealing scheduler. In IPDPS '10, pages 1--12, Washington, DC, USA, Apr 2010. IEEE Computer Society.

Digital Library

[12]

Y. Yan et al. Hierarchical place trees: A portable abstraction for task parallelism and data movement. In 22nd International Workshop, LCPC 2009. Springer, 2009.

Digital Library

[13]

Yi Guo et al. Work-first and help-first scheduling policies for async-finish task parallelism. In IPDPS'09, pages 1--12, 2009.

Digital Library

[14]

B. Goetz. Java Concurrency In Practice. Addison-Wesley, 2007.

[15]

R. Gupta. The fuzzy barrier: a mechanism for high speed synchronization of processors. In Proceedings of the third international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems, pages 54--63, New York, USA, 1989. ACM.

Digital Library

[16]

Habanero. Habanero Java. http://habanero.rice.edu/hj, Dec 2009.

[17]

James R. Larus and Ravi Rajwar. Transactional Memory. Morgan & Claypool, 2006.

[18]

Doug Lea. A java fork/join framework, 2000.

[19]

Alex Miller. Set your java 7 phasers to stun. http://tech.puredanger.com/2008/07/08/java7-phasers/, 2008.

[20]

R Milne and C Strachey. A Theory of Programming Language Semantics. Halstead Press, New York, 1976.

Digital Library

[21]

V. Sarkar. Synchronization Using Counting Semaphores. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Supercomputing, pages 627--637, July 1988.

Digital Library

[22]

Jun Shirako and Vivek Sarkar. Hierarchical phasers for scalable synchronization and reduction. In IPDPS '10, pages 1--12, Washington, DC, USA, 2010. IEEE Computer Society.

[23]

X10. Release 1.5 of X10 system dated 2007-06-29. http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=181722&package_id=210532&release_id=519811, 2007.

Cited By

Rennels LChasins S(2023)How Domain Experts Use an Embedded DSLProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228517:OOPSLA2(1499-1530)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622851
Bliudze SMavridou ASzymanek RZolotukhina A(2017)Exogenous coordination of concurrent software components with JavaBIPSoftware: Practice and Experience10.1002/spe.249547:11(1801-1836)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2017
https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.2495
Olsson RWilliamson T(2016)RJSoftware—Practice & Experience10.1002/spe.233046:5(685-708)Online publication date: 1-May-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/spe.2330
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Comparing the usability of library vs. language approaches to task parallelism
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
    2. Software libraries and repositories

Recommendations

Tracing vs. partial evaluation: comparing meta-compilation approaches for self-optimizing interpreters
OOPSLA 2015: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications

Tracing and partial evaluation have been proposed as meta-compilation techniques for interpreters to make just-in-time compilation language-independent. They promise that programs executing on simple interpreters can reach performance of the same order ...
An equational language for data-parallelism

Data-parallelism provides a clean conceptual framework for parallel programming. We are developing two programming languages: a high level equational language, called EL^*, and a low-level implementation language. Both languages exploit data-parallelism ...
Tracing vs. partial evaluation: comparing meta-compilation approaches for self-optimizing interpreters
OOPSLA '15

Tracing and partial evaluation have been proposed as meta-compilation techniques for interpreters to make just-in-time compilation language-independent. They promise that programs executing on simple interpreters can reach performance of the same order ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

PLATEAU '10: Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools

October 2010

51 pages

ISBN:9781450305471

DOI:10.1145/1937117

Copyright © 2010 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 17 October 2010

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

SPLASH '10

Sponsor:

SIGPLAN

SPLASH '10: Systems Programming Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity

October 17 - 21, 2010

Nevada, Reno

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 5 of 8 submissions, 63%

Upcoming Conference

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

10
Total Citations
View Citations
197
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)3
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 12 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Rennels LChasins S(2023)How Domain Experts Use an Embedded DSLProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228517:OOPSLA2(1499-1530)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622851
Bliudze SMavridou ASzymanek RZolotukhina A(2017)Exogenous coordination of concurrent software components with JavaBIPSoftware: Practice and Experience10.1002/spe.249547:11(1801-1836)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2017
https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.2495
Olsson RWilliamson T(2016)RJSoftware—Practice & Experience10.1002/spe.233046:5(685-708)Online publication date: 1-May-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/spe.2330
Imam SSarkar VKolodziej JChilders B(2014)Habanero-Java libraryProceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Principles and Practices of Programming on the Java platform: Virtual machines, Languages, and Tools10.1145/2647508.2647514(75-86)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2647508.2647514
Marowka A(2014)Towards Standardization of Measuring the Usability of Parallel LanguagesParallel Processing and Applied Mathematics10.1007/978-3-642-55195-6_6(65-74)Online publication date: 8-May-2014
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-55195-6_6
Shirako JSharma KSarkar V(2011)Unifying barrier and point-to-point synchronization in OpenMP with phasersProceedings of the 7th international conference on OpenMP in the Petascale era10.5555/2023025.2023038(122-137)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2023025.2023038
Marlow SNewton RPeyton Jones S(2011)A monad for deterministic parallelismACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2096148.203468546:12(71-82)Online publication date: 22-Sep-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2096148.2034685
Cavé VZhao JShirako JSarkar VProbst CWimmer C(2011)Habanero-JavaProceedings of the 9th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Programming in Java10.1145/2093157.2093165(51-61)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2093157.2093165
Marlow SNewton RPeyton Jones SClaessen K(2011)A monad for deterministic parallelismProceedings of the 4th ACM symposium on Haskell10.1145/2034675.2034685(71-82)Online publication date: 22-Sep-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2034675.2034685
Dennis JGao GMeng X(2011)Experiments with the Fresh Breeze tree-based memory modelComputer Science - Research and Development10.1007/s00450-011-0165-126:3-4(325-337)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s00450-011-0165-1

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents