Defining scalable high performance programming with DEF
Name
1201306991-MIT.pdf
Size
18.95 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
4e4e342d5bd51b0fdd1665943f0baf00
Author(s)
Leiserson, William Mitchell.
Advisor(s)
Nir Shavit.
Date Issued
2020
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Performance engineering is performed in languages that are close to the machine, especially C and C++, but these languages have little native support for concurrency. We're deep into the multicore era of computer hardware, however, meaning that scalability is dependent upon concurrent data structures. Contrast this with modern systems languages, like Go, that provide support for concurrency but incur invisible, sometimes unavoidable, overheads on basic operations. Many applications, particularly in scientific computing, require something in between. In this thesis, I present DEF, a language that's close to the machine for the sake of performance engineering, but which also has features that provide support for concurrency. These features are designed with costs that don't impede code that doesn't use them, and preserve the flexibility enjoyed by C programmers in organizing memory layout and operations. DEF occupies the excluded middle between the two categories of languages and is suitable for high performance, scalable applications.
Description
Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2020
Cataloged from PDF of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 149-156).
Subjects
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.
Persistent DSpace Link
