Defining scalable high performance programming with DEF

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Leiserson, William Mitchell.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Nir Shavit.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• 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.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/128317

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/128317