Safe Parallel Programming in Session Java
13th International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages (COORDINATION 2011)
- Nicholas Ng
- Nobuko Yoshida
- Oliver Pernet
- Raymond Hu
- Yiannos Kryftis
Abstract
The session-typed programming language Session Java (SJ) has proved to be an effective tool for distributed programming, promoting structured programming for communications and compile-time safety.
This paper investigates the use of SJ for session-typed parallel programming, and introduces new language primitives for chained iteration> and multi-channel communication. These primitives allow the efficient coordination of parallel computation across multiple processes, thus enabling SJ to express the complex communication topologies often used by parallel algorithms. We demonstrate that the new primitives yield clearer and safer code for pipeline, ring and mesh topologies through implementations of representative parallel algorithms.
We then present a semantics and session typing system including the new primitives, and prove type soundness and deadlock-freedom for our implementations. The benchmark results show that the new SJ is substantially faster than the original SJ and performs competitively against MPJ Express used as reference.
Published version via DOI | Paper | Long version | Slides | www
Benchmarks
MPJExpress vs. SJ vs. SJ with multi-channel primitives
Comparison of implementations of n-body simulation in SJ with and without multi-channel primitives.
- SJ: N-body simulation with SJ using only single-channel primitives, by opening and closing a session in each iteration.
- Multi-channel SJ: N-body simulation with new multi-channel primitives.
- Data files: MPJ Express | SJ | Multi-channel SJ
- Source files: MPJExpress | SJ | Multi-channel SJ | Topology configuration [YAML]
MPJExpress vs. SJ vs. SJ with multi-channel primitives
Comparison of implementations of a Jacobi method for solving the Discrete Poisson Equation in SJ with and without multi-channel primitives.
- SJ: Jacobi-method implementation with SJ using only single-channel primitives, by opening and closing a session in each iteration.
- Multi-channel SJ: Jacobi method implementaion with new multi-channel primitives.
- Data files: MPJ Express | SJ | Multi-channel SJ
- Source files: MPJExpress | SJ | Multi-channel SJ | Topology configuration [YAML]
Topology Verifier
- Source files [ tgz ]
- The verifier is designed to be used with the SJ compiler
Related Resources
- The SJ compiler and runtime are available on Google Code. Additional information can be found on the Session Java page.
- Masters Thesis: High performance parallel design based on session programming. Nicholas Ng, Imperial College London, June 2010.
- Masters Thesis: Session-based Programming for Message-Passing-based Parallel Algorithms. Yiannos Kryftis, Imperial College London, September 2009.