X10 on the Single-Chip Cloud Computer

Chapman, Keith and Hussein, Ahmed and Hosking, Antony L.

Abstract

The Single-Chip Cloud Computer (SCC) is an experimental processor created by Intel Labs. SCC is essentially a ‘cluster-on-a-chip’, so X10 with its support for places and remote asynchronous invocations is a natural fit for programming this platform. We report here on our experience porting X10 to the SCC, and show performance and scaling results for representative X10 benchmark applications. We compare results for our extensions to the SCC native messaging primitives in support of the X10 run-time, versus X10 on top of a prototype MPI API for SCC. The native SCC run-time exhibits better performance and scaling than the MPI binding. Scaling depends on the relative cost of computation versus communication in the workload used, since SCC is relatively underpowered for computation but has hardware support for message passing.

@inproceedings{Chapman+2011X10,
  author = {Chapman, Keith and Hussein, Ahmed and Hosking, Antony L.},
  title = {X10 on the Single-Chip Cloud Computer},
  booktitle = {X10 Workshop},
  year = {2011},
  pages = {7:1--8},
  month = {June},
  address = {San Jose, California},
  doi = {10.1145/2212736.2212743},
  acm = {http://dl.acm.org/authorize?N93666},
  gscholar = {8}
}