Alan George, University of Florida (X10 team contact: Evelyn Duesterwald)

Given the importance of performance tools for productive HPC development, this project aims to explore the challenges involved in enabling experimental performance analysis of X10 applications. Our exploration will leverage the existing Parallel Performance Wizard (PPW) system, one of the foremost performance tools that supports Partitioned Global-Address-Space (PGAS) programming models, and the Global Address Space Performance (GASP) interface, which specifies the interaction between a performance tool and a PGAS programming model implementation. By extending PPW and GASP to support X10’s unique features, we aim to provide a prototype performance tool supporting X10 application analysis. Such a tool would be of substantial benefit to X10 application developers, providing them with a variety of capabilities to capture and understand program performance in terms of X10 constructs. Given X10's provisions for high-level parallelism, with abstractions that may often hide the potential performance impact of some language constructs and thus make manual performance monitoring difficult, it is particularly important for application developers to have access to tools that automatically collect and provide views into X10 application performance data. Successful completion of this project would comprise substantial progress toward bring much-needed performance tool capabilities to the world of X10 application development.