ng: What next-generation languages can teach us about HENP frameworks in the manycore era

• Published in: Journal of physics. Conference series Vol. 331; no. 4; pp. 042002 - 6
• Main Author: Binet, Sébastien
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bristol IOP Publishing 01.01.2011
• Subjects: Architecture; Bullets; Communication; FORTRAN; Languages; Message passing; Nuclear physics; Parallel programming; Physics; Programming; Projectiles; Prototyping
• ISSN: 1742-6596; 1742-6588; 1742-6596
• DOI: 10.1088/1742-6596/331/4/042002

Current High Energy and Nuclear Physics (HENP) frameworks were written before multicore systems became widely deployed. A 'single-thread' execution model naturally emerged from that environment, however, this no longer fits into the processing model on the dawn of the manycore era. Although previous work focused on minimizing the changes to be applied to the LHC frameworks (because of the data taking phase) while still trying to reap the benefits of the parallel-enhanced CPU architectures, this paper explores what new languages could bring to the design of the next-generation frameworks. Parallel programming is still in an intensive phase of R&D and no silver bullet exists despite the 30+ years of literature on the subject. Yet, several parallel programming styles have emerged: actors, message passing, communicating sequential processes, task-based programming, data flow programming, to name a few. We present the work of the prototyping of a next-generation framework in new and expressive languages (python and Go) to investigate how code clarity and robustness are affected and what are the downsides of using languages younger than FORTRAN/C/C++.