Array languages and the N‐body problem

Abstract

SUMMARYThis paper is a description of the contributions to the SICSA multicore challenge on many body planetary simulation made by a compiler group at the University of Glasgow. Our group is part of the Computer Vision and Graphics research group and we have for some years been developing array compilers because we think these are a good tool both for expressing graphics algorithms and for exploiting the parallelism that computer vision applications require. We shall describe experiments using two languages on two dierent platforms and we shall compare the performance of these with reference C implementations running on the same platforms. Finally we shall draw conclusions both about the viability of the array language approach as compared to other approaches used in the challenge and also about the strengths and weaknesses of the two, very dierent, processor architectures we used. Copyright © 0000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Received . . . ARRAY LANGUAGESBy the term array language, we mean a programming language that allows array values to be operated on as a whole: passed to functions as a whole, returned from functions as a whole, subjected to arithmetic operations as a whole, and, in the case of an imperative language, assigned as a whole.

Array programming in pascal

“…Performance achieved on Intel AVX and SSE architectures is comparable to the use of C with Vector Intrinsics and threaded building blocks [3]. However when compared to GPUs performance it is not as performant as Cuda.…”