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Caffeine: CoArray Fortran Framework of Efficient Interfaces to Network Environments
Caffeine is a parallel runtime library that aims to support Fortran compilers by providing a programming-model-agnostic Parallel Runtime Interface for Fortran (PRIF) that can be implemented atop various communication libraries. Current work is on supporting the PRIF interface with the GASNet-EX or with POSIX processes. Future plans include support for an alternative MPI back end.
Caffeine Repository
2023
Damian Rouson, Brad Richardson, Dan Bonachea, Katherine Rasmussen, "Parallel Runtime Interface for Fortran (PRIF) Design Document, Revision 0.2", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Technical Report, December 20, 2023, LBNL 2001563, doi: 10.25344/S4DG6S
This design document proposes an interface to support the parallel features of Fortran, named the Parallel Runtime Interface for Fortran (PRIF). PRIF is a proposed solution in which the runtime library is responsible for coarray allocation, deallocation and accesses, image synchronization, atomic operations, events, and teams. In this interface, the compiler is responsible for transforming the invocation of Fortran-level parallel features into procedure calls to the necessary PRIF procedures. The interface is designed for portability across shared- and distributed-memory machines, different operating systems, and multiple architectures. Implementations of this interface are intended as an augmentation for the compiler’s own runtime library. With an implementation-agnostic interface, alternative parallel runtime libraries may be developed that support the same interface. One benefit of this approach is the ability to vary the communication substrate. A central aim of this document is to define a parallel runtime interface in standard Fortran syntax, which enables us to leverage Fortran to succinctly express various properties of the procedure interfaces, including argument attributes.
2022
Katherine Rasmussen, Damian Rouson, Naje George, Dan Bonachea, Hussain Kadhem, Brian Friesen, "Agile Acceleration of LLVM Flang Support for Fortran 2018 Parallel Programming", Research Poster at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC22), November 2022, doi: 10.25344/S4CP4S
The LLVM Flang compiler ("Flang") is currently Fortran 95 compliant, and the frontend can parse Fortran 2018. However, Flang does not have a comprehensive 2018 test suite and does not fully implement the static semantics of the 2018 standard. We are investigating whether agile software development techniques, such as pair programming and test-driven development (TDD), can help Flang to rapidly progress to Fortran 2018 compliance. Because of the paramount importance of parallelism in high-performance computing, we are focusing on Fortran’s parallel features, commonly denoted “Coarray Fortran.” We are developing what we believe are the first exhaustive, open-source tests for the static semantics of Fortran 2018 parallel features, and contributing them to the LLVM project. A related effort involves writing runtime tests for parallel 2018 features and supporting those tests by developing a new parallel runtime library: the CoArray Fortran Framework of Efficient Interfaces to Network Environments (Caffeine).
Damian Rouson, Dan Bonachea, "Caffeine: CoArray Fortran Framework of Efficient Interfaces to Network Environments", Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Workshop on the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure in HPC (LLVM-HPC2022), Dallas, Texas, USA, IEEE, November 2022, doi: 10.25344/S4459B
This paper provides an introduction to the CoArray Fortran Framework of Efficient Interfaces to Network Environments (Caffeine), a parallel runtime library built atop the GASNet-EX exascale networking library. Caffeine leverages several non-parallel Fortran features to write type- and rank-agnostic interfaces and corresponding procedure definitions that support parallel Fortran 2018 features, including communication, collective operations, and related services. One major goal is to develop a runtime library that can eventually be considered for adoption by LLVM Flang, enabling that compiler to support the parallel features of Fortran. The paper describes the motivations behind Caffeine's design and implementation decisions, details the current state of Caffeine's development, and previews future work. We explain how the design and implementation offer benefits related to software sustainability by lowering the barrier to user contributions, reducing complexity through the use of Fortran 2018 C-interoperability features, and high performance through the use of a lightweight communication substrate.
