The SPC Approach to Reconciling Portability and Performance

Despite recent advances in compiler technology, programmers are still confronted with machinedependent optimization issues such as code and data placement in order to fully exploit a target parallel machine's performance potential. Reconciling the generally conflicting goals of portability and performance requires completely automatic, retargetable program compilation. The efficiency of the cost estimation techniques needed to steer the compile-time optimization process, however, critically depends on the choice of parallel programming model. We present a new coordination model, called SPC, that imposes specific restrictions in the synchronization structures that can be programmed. Imposing these restrictions enables the efficient computation of reliable cost estimations that can be used in the automatic optimization process. We illustrate the use of SPC through various programming examples. We describe the compilation of SPC, showing how SPC paves the way for automatic compile-time op..