Programmability and portability for exascale: Top down programming methodology and tools with StarSs

StarSs is a task-based programming model that allows to parallelize sequential applications by means of annotating the code with compiler directives. The model further supports transparent execution of designated tasks on heterogeneous platforms, including clusters of GPUs. This paper focuses on the methodology and tools that complements the programming model forming a consistent development environment with the objective of simplifying the live of application developers.The programming environment includes the tools TAREADOR and TEMANEJO, which have been designed specifically for StarSs. TAREADOR, a Valgrind-based tool, allows a top-down development approach by assisting the programmer in identifying tasks and their data-dependencies across all concurrency levels of an application. TEMANEJO is a graphical debugger supporting the programmer by visualizing the task dependency tree on one hand, but also allowing to manipulate task scheduling or dependencies. These tools are complemented with a set of performance analysis tools (Scalasca, Cube and Paraver) that enable to fine tune StarSs application. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.We thankfully acknowledge the support of the European Commission through the TEXT project (FP7-261580) and the HiPEAC-3 Network of Excellence (FP7-ICT 287759), and the support of the Spanish Ministry of Education (TIN2007-60625, TIN2012-34557 and CSD2007-00050), the Generalitat de Catalunya (2009-SGR-980)Peer Reviewe