%0 Journal Article
%T SPOT: A DSL for Extending Fortran Programs with Metaprogramming
%A Songqing Yue
%A Jeff Gray
%J Advances in Software Engineering
%D 2014
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2014/917327
%X Metaprogramming has shown much promise for improving the quality of software by offering programming language techniques to address issues of modularity, reusability, maintainability, and extensibility. Thus far, the power of metaprogramming has not been explored deeply in the area of high performance computing (HPC). There is a vast body of legacy code written in Fortran running throughout the HPC community. In order to facilitate software maintenance and evolution in HPC systems, we introduce a DSL that can be used to perform source-to-source translation of Fortran programs by providing a higher level of abstraction for specifying program transformations. The underlying transformations are actually carried out through a metaobject protocol (MOP) and a code generator is responsible for translating a SPOT program to the corresponding MOP code. The design focus of the framework is to automate program transformations through techniques of code generation, so that developers only need to specify desired transformations while being oblivious to the details about how the transformations are performed. The paper provides a general motivation for the approach and explains its design and implementation. In addition, this paper presents case studies that illustrate the potential of our approach to improve code modularity, maintainability, and productivity. 1. Introduction High performance computing (HPC) provides solutions to problems that demand significant computational power or problems that require fast access and processing of a large amount of data. HPC programs are usually run on systems such as supercomputers, computer clusters, or grids, which can offer excellent computational power by decomposing a large problem into pieces, where ideally all of these pieces can be processed concurrently. In the past decades, the hardware architectures used in HPC have evolved significantly from supercomputers to clusters and grids, while the progress in software development has not progressed at the same rate [1]. In fact, HPC was once the primary domain of scientific computing, but the recent advances in multicore processors as a commodity in most new personal computers are forcing traditional software developers to also develop skills in parallel programming in order to harness the newfound power. The recent advances in hardware capabilities impose higher demands on the software in HPC. In this work, we have investigated a number of challenges in developing HPC software, some of which might be improved with approaches and practices that have long existed in the area
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ase/2014/917327/