Communications of the ACM
Faster Parallel Computing
Researchers have designed a new programming language that lets application developers manage memory more efficiently in programs that deal with scattered data points in large data sets.
Credit: Christine Daniloff/MIT
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) this week are presenting Milk, a new programming language, at the 25th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques in Haifa, Israel.
With Milk, application developers can handle memory more efficiently in programs that manage scattered datapoints in large datasets.
Tests on several common algorithms showed programs written in Milk topped the speed of those written in existing languages by a factor of four, and the CSAIL researchers think additional work will boost speeds even higher.
MIT professor Saman Amarasinghe says existing memory management methods run into problems with big datasets because with big data, the scale of the solution does not necessarily rise in proportion to the scale of the problem.
Amarasinghe also notes modern computer chips are not optimized for this "sparse data," with cores designed to retrieve an entire block of data from main memory based on locality, instead of individually retrieving a single data item.
With Milk, a coder inserts a few additional lines of code around any command that iterates via a large dataset looking for a comparatively small number of items. The researchers say Milk's compiler then determines how to manage memory accordingly.
From MIT News
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