High level languages for efficient parallel programming

Abstract

Efficient parallel programming has always been very tricky and only expert programmers are able to take the most of the computing power of modern computers. Such a situation is an obstacle to the development of the high performance computing in other sciences as well as in the industry. The fast changes in the computer architecture (multicores, manycores, GPU, clusters, ...) make even more difficult, even for an experienced programmer, to remain at the forefront of these evolutions. On the other hand, a huge amount of work has been done to develop programming languages or libraries that tend to help the programmers to write parallel programs which are more or less efficient. The key point in this kind of research is to find a good balance between the simplicity of the programming and the efficiency of the resulting programs. Many approaches have been proposed but none really prevail over the others. This paper is a small overview of some directions that seem promising to both simplify parallel programming and produce very efficient programs.