A comparative study and empirical evaluation of global view high performance Linpack program in X10

Abstract

High-performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark is used to evaluate the performance of super computers. It implements blocked, right-looking Gaussian elimination with row partial pivoting. Block cyclic distribution is used in the parallel variant. In this paper, we implement the HPL in X10. X10 is a high level high-performance programming language based on the sequential semantics of Java augmented with new concurrency constructs, namely, places, asyncs, finish, atomic and clock. X10 also provides a rich array language which includes region, distributions and distributed arrays. We use HPL as a case study to evaluate the global view paradigm of X10. A global view program uses globally distributed arrays and global array indices without any process-specific code. We compare the elegance of global view programs over the local view version. We also show that the performance of global view program is no worse than the local view version. © 2009 ACM.