POSE: Phase I: Open Source Ecosystem for OpenCilk

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This project is funded by Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) which seeks to harness the power of open-source development for the creation of new technology solutions to problems of national and societal importance. The goal of this POSE project is to scope an open-source ecosystem (OSE) for OpenCilk, a new task-parallel, fully open-source platform for programming multicore computers, the dominant architecture for computing today. The recent demise of Moore's Law and the impending end to the miniaturization of semiconductor circuitry have ended semiconductor technology's virtual monopoly on growing computing performance. OpenCilk is a key technology for multicore performance engineering - developing fast code for applications that run on commodity and cloud multicore computers - giving application developers a powerful alternative source for performance. The project's novelties include pursuing an academic-first strategy for developing an OpenCilk OSE by focusing on winning the hearts and minds of academic researchers, educators, and students who are not well served by existing task-parallel programming platforms. Among the project's impacts are the creation of an effective strategy for expanding the set of OpenCilk users and contributors, for building an academic community for performance engineering, and for providing teaching materials for performance engineering using OpenCilk. The broader impacts of the project are to enable the newly created performance-engineering community to improve modern performance-critical applications ~W including machine learning, simulation of physical phenomena, and computer security - which are national strategic priorities. OpenCilk's adoption market is constituted largely from the following segments: (1) nonacademic software developers who are mostly from industry; (2) researchers developing task-parallel programming technology and applications; (3) educators teaching parallel computing and software performance engineering; and (4) students who take their classes. The mission of OpenCilk is to make it easy for developers to write fast and correct multicore code, for researchers to pioneer technologies that empower developers, and for educators to teach and students to learn software performance engineering. To that end, OpenCilk abides by the following guiding principles: - The language should be simple and easy to reason about. - Bugs should be easy to reliably discover and diagnose. - Parallel performance should be scalable, composable, and backed by simple mathematical guarantees. - The system should be open source and easy to use, teach with, modify, and extend. This OSE project is experimenting with strategies for outbound, inbound, and peer networking to identify and engage potential OpenCilk users and contributors in academia. Once an academic niche has been established, the OpenCilk OSE being scoped can evolve to address the entire market, which includes commercial developers. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.