X10 is a
programming language
A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language.
The description of a programming ...
being developed by
IBM at the
Thomas J. Watson Research Center
The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for IBM Research. The center comprises three sites, with its main laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, U.S., 38 miles (61 km) north of New York City, Albany, New York and wit ...
as part of the Productive, Easy-to-use, Reliable Computing System (
PERCS
PERCS (Productive, Easy-to-use, Reliable Computing System) is IBM's answer to DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) initiative. The program resulted in commercial development and deployment of the Power 775, a supercomputer design ...
) project funded by
DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the Adv ...
's
High Productivity Computing Systems
High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) is a DARPA project for developing a new generation of economically viable high productivity computing systems for national security and industry in the 2002–10 timeframe.
The HPC Challenge (High-perfo ...
(HPCS) program.
History
Its primary authors are Kemal Ebcioğlu, Saravanan Arumugam (Aswath), Vijay Saraswat, and Vivek Sarkar.
X10 is designed specifically for
parallel computing
Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different fo ...
using the
partitioned global address space
In computer science, partitioned global address space (PGAS) is a parallel programming model paradigm. PGAS is typified by communication operations involving a global memory address space abstraction that is logically partitioned, where a portion ...
(PGAS) model.
A computation is divided among a set of ''places'', each of which holds some data and hosts one or more ''activities'' that operate on those data. It has a constrained type system for object-oriented programming, a form of
dependent types
In computer science and logic, a dependent type is a type whose definition depends on a value. It is an overlapping feature of type theory and type systems. In intuitionistic type theory, dependent types are used to encode logic's quantifiers lik ...
. Other features include user-defined primitive ''struct'' types; globally distributed ''arrays'', and structured and unstructured parallelism.
X10 uses the concept of parent and child relationships for activities to prevent the lock stalemate that can occur when two or more processes wait for each other to finish before they can complete. An activity may spawn one or more child activities, which may themselves have children. Children cannot wait for a parent to finish, but a parent can wait for a child using the ''finish'' command.
See also
*
Chapel
A chapel is a Christian place of prayer and worship that is usually relatively small. The term has several meanings. Firstly, smaller spaces inside a church that have their own altar are often called chapels; the Lady chapel is a common ty ...
*
Coarray Fortran
Coarray Fortran (CAF), formerly known as F--, started as an extension of Fortran 95/2003 for parallel processing created by Robert Numrich and John Reid in the 1990s. The Fortran 2008 standard (ISO/IEC 1539-1:2010) now includes coarrays (spel ...
*
Concurrency
*
Fortress
A fortification is a military construction or building designed for the defense of territories in warfare, and is also used to establish rule in a region during peacetime. The term is derived from Latin ''fortis'' ("strong") and ''facere'' ...
*
Non-blocking algorithm
In computer science, an algorithm is called non-blocking if failure or suspension of any thread cannot cause failure or suspension of another thread; for some operations, these algorithms provide a useful alternative to traditional blocking i ...
*
Parallel programming model
In computing, a parallel programming model is an abstraction of parallel computer architecture, with which it is convenient to express algorithms and their composition in programs. The value of a programming model can be judged on its ''generality ...
*
Unified Parallel C
Unified Parallel C (UPC) is an extension of the C programming language designed for high-performance computing on large-scale parallel machines, including those with a common global address space ( SMP and NUMA) and those with distributed memory ...
References
External links
*
Overview of PGAS languagesVivek Sarkar's X10 slidesGPLed X10 prototype
IBM software
Array programming languages
Concurrent programming languages
JVM programming languages
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