An introduction to the X10 language and its applications

Nicolás Erdödy and Jim Cheetham

Open Parallel Ltd.

X10 is a programming language being developed at IBM Research in collaboration with academic partners. Part of DARPA's program on High Productivity Computer Systems, X10 is being designed to unveil Power7's potential (8-core processor with 1.2 billion transistors released by IBM in 2010). X10 is a type-safe, parallel object-oriented language that targets parallel systems with multicore SMP nodes interconnected in scalable cluster configurations.

Open Parallel sees a lot of potential for X10 in the existing Java based research community and is diving deeper into the language. We established a relation with the principal authors at IBM Research looking for new application areas for X10 which could be focused on scientific/technical computing, looking to expand X10's reach to new areas like a Hadoop engine involving a rewrite with the features X10 offers.

In this presentation we discuss general characteristics of parallel programming, offer an overview of existent languages and review resources and tools available for researchers, users, developers and educators that wish to use the X10 language.

We will provide examples of applications being researched and developed in the local community, i.e. the case of an Otago company which has a problem that takes 6 – 18 hours when run on commodity hardware. Working with a supercomputer will reduce the time to half an hour by processing in parallel. This and other problems are relevant and able to be tested on NIWA's High Performance Computing Facility among others.

Open Parallel specialises on Software for Multicore and Parallel Computing. We work around multicore and manycore systems and parallel programming independently of the size of the problems. Open Parallel gathered 200 people in January 2011 in Australia for its II miniconference, with Vint Cerf (Google) and Paul McKenney (IBM) as keynotes and Linus Torvalds attending.

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