The Analysis of Clocks in X10 Programs

Abstract. Distributed and concurrent programming languages are be-coming more prevelant with the emergence of new parallel architectures. Reducing communication and synchronization costs is a major issue in concurrent languages. In this paper, we deal with the X10 programming language, a distributed concurrent language that uses clocks for synchronization. Using these clocks can be costly because they provide synchronization between mul-tiple tasks. To partially mitigate this, we use static analysis to determine properties of each clock that can be used to optimize its implementation. Experimentally, we find our procedure runs in only a few seconds for modest-sized programs, making it practical to use as part of a compila-tion chain