Developer Productivity on Novel Architectures (or, Surviving in the Wild West)

Teatime theme - Collegeville 2020

Charles Ferenbaugh, Los Alamos National Laboratory

In the past decade or so, large-scale software projects have started to support novel architectures that are wildly different from the standard CPU model: multi-core, many-core, IBM Cell, GPGPU (from multiple vendors!), …. Developing for these architectures, especially when trying to write performant code, can bring particular challenges to productivity such as:

• How to reconcile fast-changing new models and libraries with stable production code?
• How to support new platforms without degrading performance on existing platforms?
• How to deal with toolchain support (compilers, debuggers, test harnesses, …) that is missing or immature?

In this teatime we’ll discuss these questions, and other related ones as they arise. Please bring your questions, experiences, failures, and successes to share with the group!