Speaker
Dr
Sebastien Binet
(LAL/IN2P3)
Description
Current HENP libraries and frameworks were written before multicore
systems became widely deployed and used.
From this environment, a 'single-thread' processing model naturally
emerged but the implicit assumptions it encouraged are greatly
impairing our abilities to scale in a multicore/manycore world.
Writing scalable code in C++ for multicore architectures, while
doable, is no panacea. Sure, C++11 will improve on the current
situation (by standardizing on std::thread, introducing lambda
functions and defining a memory model) but it will do so at the price
of complicating further an already quite sophisticated language.
This level of sophistication has probably already strongly motivated
analysis groups to migrate to CPython, hoping for its current
limitations with respect to multicore scalability to be either lifted
(Grand Interpreter Lock removal) or for the advent of a new Python VM
better tailored for this kind of environment (PyPy, Jython,...)
Could HENP migrate to a language with none of the deficiencies of C++
(build time, deployment, low level tools for concurrency) and with the
fast turn-around time, simplicity and ease of coding of Python ?
This paper will try to make the case for Go - a young open source
language with built-in facilities to easily express and expose
concurrency - being such a language.
We will first present a status update on go-gaudi, a framework written
in Go loosely modeled after the C++ framework Gaudi used by two LHC
experiments, and how its event loop was modified to expose more
concurrency.
Then, benchmarks fed with data flows extracted from current C++
frameworks and with different toy-components
(thread-safe/non-thread-safe, I/O bound, CPU bound, ...) will be
discussed.
Finally, we will introduce GoCxx, a tool leveraging gcc-xml's output
to automatize the tedious work of creating Go wrappers for foreign
languages, a critical task for any language wishing to leverage
legacy and field-tested code.
We will conclude with the first results of applying GoCxx to real C++
Gaudi components, effectively enabling go-gaudi with LHC know-how.
Summary
We present GoCxx, a tool to automatize the wrapping of C++ libraries, and its impact on next-generation parallel event processing frameworks.
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Author
Dr
Sebastien Binet
(LAL/IN2P3)
