Through the Steps of Programmable Refactoring of a large Scientific Code

Speaker:  Michele Martone - Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Garching bei Muenchen (Germany)
  Monday, November 25, 2019 at 4:00 PM Sala Verde
Large, mature High Performance Computing (HPC) codes are facing a multitude of challenges today. One of them is the need to cope with the heterogenity of hardware platforms and often diverging `performance' solutions, be it programming models, libraries, or data structures. The main risks are low performance (leading to waste of energy) and obsolescence (leading to waste of manpower). In this talk, I will go through the major steps I performed in restructuring the major cosmological simulation code "GADGET" (~150 KLOC of C); more precisely: changing its data structures in a pervasive, yet thoughly programmatic and parametric manner. The goals of the talk are to illustrate a real use of the "Coccinelle" program-matching and transformation tool (so far under-utilized in the HPC context), and to show where formal methods, HPC and software engineering may meet.

Contact Person: M. Caliari

Programme Director

External reference
Publication date
October 16, 2019

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