Translation techniques for distributed-shared memory programming models

The high performance computing community has experienced an explosive improvement in distributed-shared memory hardware. Driven by increasing real-world problem complexity, this explosion has ushered in vast numbers of new systems. Each new system presents new challenges to programmers and application developers. Part of the challenge is adapting to new architectures with new performance characteristics. Different vendors release systems with widely varying architectures that perform differently in different situations. Furthermore, since vendors need only provide a single performance number (total MFLOPS, typically for a single benchmark), they only have strong incentive initially to optimize the API of their choice. Consequently, only a fraction of the available APIs are well optimized on most systems. This causes issues porting and writing maintainable software, let alone issues for programmers burdened with mastering each new API as it is released. Also, programmers wishing to use a certain machine must choose their API based on the underlying hardware instead of the application. This thesis argues that a flexible, extensible translator for distributed-shared memory APIs can help address some of these issues. For example, a translator might take as input code in one API and output an equivalent program in another. Such a translator could provide instant porting for applications to new systems that do not support the application's library or language natively. While open-source APIs are abundant, they do not perform optimally everywhere. A translator would also allow performance testing using a single base code translated to a number of different APIs. Most significantly, this type of translator frees programmers to select the most appropriate API for a given application based on the application (and developer) itself instead of the underlying hardware