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1 <html>
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2 <head>
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3 <title>Introduction</title>
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4 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
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5 </head>
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6
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7 <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
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8
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9 <p> </p>
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10 <h2>Introduction</h2>
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11 <p> </p>
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12 <p>EQNLang is an extensible language for parallel programming. It has a visual
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13 interface, allows extensions of both its visual syntax and its semantics, and
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14 it allows automated symbolic manipulation of code to specialize it to specific
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15 parallel hardware, for high performance.</p>
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16 <p>EQNLang has a visual interface, in which any SVG graphic can be used as a syntactic
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17 element in the language. In fact, while developing code, most applications will
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18 add their own syntax as part of the application. This new syntax can then be
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19 shared for others to use.</p>
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20 <p>The source format of the language is a syntax graph. There is no text form
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21 of the code. This is what enables new syntax to be arbitrary graphics. The grammar
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22 of the language is embedded in the editing process. One is only allowed to build
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23 valid syntax graphs. Another consequence of using a syntax graph as the source
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24 form is that properties can be attached to new commands defined inside applications.
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25 This is the key to the portable parallelism.</p>
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26 <p>Performance portability of parallel code requires the code to be transformable
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27 to fit specific hardware well. High performance can only be achieved when the
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28 patterns in the code fit closely to the patterns in the hardware. Such transformations
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29 go beyond what compilers typically carry out; they are more like what a symbolic
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30 math package like MAPLE or MathCAD or Mathmatica perform.</p>
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31 <p>To enable such transforms for parallel code, the parallel code must provide
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32 the same thing that equations provide to the math package: properties. It is
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33 properties such as associativity, distributivity, and so forth that allow the
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34 automated symbolic manipulation. EQNLang follows this pattern of providing properties
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35 of commands. Each primitive command of the language comes pre-tagged with its
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36 properties, and the end-user who defines a new syntactic element states which
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37 properties their new element has. For some properties, additional code is provided
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38 that is a "plugin" to the symbolic manipulator. This additional code
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39 performs the manipulation on the source-graph.</p>
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40 <p>The result is a high-level declarative language that is highly productive for
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41 programmers, yet high performance across parallel hardware.</p>
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42 <p><a href="index.html">back</a></p>
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43 </body>
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44 </html>
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