Compilers and the Furture of High Performance Computing

Compiler technology has enabled the software advances of the last sixty years. It has given us machine-independent programming and improved productivity by automatically handling a number of issues, such as instruction selection and register allocation. However, in the parallel world of high performance computing, the impact of compiler technology has been small. Part of the reason is that the ambitious research projects of the last few decades, such as automatic parallelization and automatic generation of distributed memory programs à la High Performance Fortran, are yet to produce useful results. The absence of effective compiler technology has resulted in lack of portability and low productivity in the programming of parallel machines. With these problems growing more serious, due to the popularization of parallelism and the complexity increase expected in future high-end machines, advances in compiler technology are now more important than ever. In this presentation, I will discuss the state of the long standing problem of automatic parallelization and describe new important lines of research such as the identification of levels of abstractions that help both productivity and compilation, the development of a solid understanding of the automatic optimization process, the creation of a research methodology to enable the quantification of progress, and the development of an effective methodology for the interaction of programmers with compilers.