SC15 Invited Talk Spotlight: Superscalar Programming Models - Making Applications Platform Agnostic

StarSs is a task-based programming model by Barcelona Supercomputing Center that has the potential to change the way applications are developed (click on image to enlarge).

Programming models play a key role providing abstractions of the underlying architecture and systems to the application developer and enabling the exploitation of the computing resources possibilities from a suitable programming interface.

When considering complex systems with aspects such as large scale, distribution, heterogeneity, variability, etc. it is indeed more important to offer programming paradigms that simplify the life of the programmers while still providing competitive performance results.

StarSs (Star superscalar) is a task-based family of programming models that is based on the idea of writing sequential code which is executed in parallel at run-time taking into account the data dependencies between tasks.

The talk will describe the evolution of this programming model and the different challenges that have been addressed in order to consider different underlying platforms from heterogeneous platforms used in HPC to distributed environments, such as federated clouds and mobile systems.

Speaker background:

Dr. Badia in the MareNostrum supercomputer site (BSC, Spain).

Rosa M. Badia holds a PhD on Computer Science (1994) from the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC). She is a Scientific Researcher from the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) and team leader of the Workflows and Distributed Computing research group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). She was involved in teaching and research activities at the UPC from 1989 to 2008, where she was an Associated Professor since year 1997. From 1999 European Center of Parallelism of Barcelona (CEPBA).

Her current research interest are programming models for complex platforms (from multicore, GPUs to Grid/Cloud). The group led by Dr. Badia has been developing StarSs programming model for more than 10 years, with a high success in adoption by application developers. Currently the group focuses its efforts in two instances of StarSs: OmpSs for heterogeneous platforms and COMPSs/PyCOMPSs for distributed computing including Cloud.

For this last case, the group has been doing efforts on interoperability through standards, for example using OCCI to enable COMPSs to interact with several Cloud providers at a time. Dr Badia has published more than 150 papers in international conferences and journals in the topics of her research. She has participated in several European projects, for example BEinGRID, Brein, CoreGRID, OGF-Europe, SIENA, TEXT and VENUS-C, and currently she is participating in the project Severo Ochoa (at Spanish level), ASCETIC, Euroserver, The Human Brain Project, EU-Brazil CloudConnect, and trasnPLANT and it is a member of HiPEAC2 NoE.

This is the second episode in a series providing you with details behind the SC15 Invited Talks Program.