The FG Programming Environment: Reducing Source Code Size for Parallel Programs Running on Clusters

FG is a programming environment designed to reduce the source code size and complexity of out-of-core programs running on clusters. Our goals for FG are threefold: (1) make these programs smaller, (2) make them faster, and (3) reduce time-to-solution. In this paper, we focus on the first metric: the efficacy of FG for reducing source code size and complexity. We designed FG to fit programs, including high-end computing (HEC) applications, for which hiding latency is paramount to designing an efficient implementation. Specifically, we target out-of-core programs that fit into a pipeline framework. We use as benchmarks three outof-core implementations: bit-matrix-multiply/complement (BMMC) permutations, fast Fourier transform (FFT), and columnsort. FG reduces source code size by approximately 14–26% for these programs. Moreover, we believe that the code FG eliminates is the most difficult to write and debug.