ICCSE Keynote Speech: Advances in Parallel Programming

Abstract

While the Message Passing Interface (MPI) has been the dominant paradigm of choice for programming parallel applications, there has been much discussion about the inherent limitations of the message paradigm scheme. As a result, many new initiatives have been launched and initiatives have been taken. One promising directions has been that of the Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming model and its associated languages. This class of languages is characterized by its locality awareness and its one sided communications. Examples of the PGAS languages are Unified Parallel (UPC), Co-Array Fortran (CAF) and Titanium. In addition, the DARPA High-Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program is targeting systems, and consequently languages, that can minimize time-to-solution by 2010. Thus, both application development time and execution time are targeted for reduction. Two examples of the HPC languages are the X10, proposed by IBM, and Chapel, proposed by Cray. This talk will provide an overview of these new directions in parallel programming and will provide some insight into the benefits and challenges associated with these directions by examining some of the specifics of the UPC programming language.

Short Biography

Dr. Tarek El-Ghazawi is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The George Washington University. He is the founding director of the GWU High Performance Computing Laboratory (HPCL), and a Cofounder of the NSF Industry/University Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (CHREC). Dr. El-Ghazawi's research interests include high-performance computing, computer architectures, reconfigurable and embedded computing, and applications to remote sensing and image processing. He has received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from New Mexico State University in 1988. Tarek El-Ghazawi is one of the principal co-authors of the UPC programming language and the first author of the UPC book that interprets the language, from John Wiley and Sons. He has published over a 150 refereed research publications in these areas.

Dr. El-Ghazawi is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Computers and has been a guest editor for IEEE Computer and the IEEE Concurrency magazines. Dr. El-Ghazawi's research has been supported by government and industry including NSF, NASA, DARPA/DoD, IBM, SGI, and Microsoft. Dr. El-Ghazawi has received the IBM faculty award in 2004. He has been serving as a consultant and on technical/science advisory boards for many government and industrial organizations. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a member of the ACM and Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society.