Compiling Matlab for High Performance Computing via X 10 1 Sable Technical Report

Matlab is a popular dynamic array-based language commonly used by students, scientists and engineers, who appreciate the interactive development style, the rich set of array operators, the extensive builtin library, and the fact that they do not have to declare static types. Even though these users like to program in Matlab, their computations are often very computeintensive and are better suited for emerging high performance computing systems. Our solution is MiX10, a source-to-source compiler that automatically translates Matlab programs to X10, a language designed for ”Performance and Productivity at Scale”; thus, helping scientific programmers make better use of high performance computing systems. This paper addresses two major challenges in compiling Matlab to X10 for high performance computing: (1) efficiently transforming dynamically-typed Matlab arrays to the best high-level, statically-typed array representation in X10; and (2) effectively exposing concurrency in Matlab and generating efficient concurrent code in X10. We have implemented the techniques presented in this paper and provide an empirical study on a set of benchmarks, examining both the efficiency of the generated sequential X10 code and speedups for the concurrent versions.