Regent: A High-Productivity Programming Language for HPC with Logical Regions

We present Regent, a high-productivity programming lan-guage for high performance computing with logical regions. Regent users compose programs with tasks (functions eligi-ble for parallel execution) and logical regions (hierarchical collections of structured objects). Regent programs appear to execute sequentially, require no explicit synchronization, and are trivially deadlock-free. Regent’s type system catches many common classes of mistakes and guarantees that a pro-gram with correct serial execution produces identical results on parallel and distributed machines. We present an optimizing compiler for Regent that trans-lates Regent programs into efficient implementations for Le-gion, an asynchronous task-based model. Regent employs several novel compiler optimizations to minimize the dy-namic overhead of the runtime system and enable efficient operation. We evaluate Regent on three benchmark appli-cations and demonstrate that Regent achieves performance comparable to hand-tuned Legion. Categories and Subject Descriptor