Dear PL Group,

Today we have Will and Eric giving a joint talk about a language for
declarative MPI communication. Details follow:


Title:
Rankor: Declarative Communication for High-Performance Computing

Speakers:
Will Byrd and Eric Holk

When and Where:
LH115, 4:00pm, Fri Apr 23rd

Abstract:
The Message Passing Interface (MPI) library, designed in the early 1990's,
is widely used by C++ and Fortran programmers writing scientific and
engineering codes running on high performance computers. MPI programmers
benefit from the expressibility and efficiency of relatively high-level
communication operators known as ``collectives.'' Unfortunately,
programmers are limited to the handful of collectives built into MPI, or to
the collectives pre-defined in third-party libraries. We present the design
of Rankor, a language for declaratively specifying communications; Rankor
can be thought of as a Domain Specific Language for defining communication
collectives for MPI. Rankor expresses existing MPI collectives well, and
also provides a clean syntax for user-defined collectives. We also discuss
our ongoing effort to implement a Rankor prototype using C++ templates.


regards,
Roshan