X10: an Experimental Language for High Productivity Programming of Scalable Systems

It is well established that application development pro-ductivity is a significant bottleneck in the time to solution for obtaining production applications on High-End Computing (HEC) systems. Previously, we introduced a simple model for defining application development productivity in the presence of multiple expertise levels, and used this model to motivate the programming model and tools solution be-ing pursued in the IBM PERCS project [9]. In this paper, we describe X10, an experimental language that embodies a new parallel programming model serves as the foundation for multiple productivity-improving technologies in PERCS ranging from visualization and refactoring tools to static and dynamic optimizing compilers.