Welcome to COMPSs!

_images/COMPSs_logo.png

COMP Superscalar (COMPSs) is a task-based programming model which aims to ease the development of applications for distributed infrastructures, such as large High-Performance clusters (HPC), clouds and container managed clusters. COMPSs provides a programming interface for the development of the applications and a runtime system that exploits the inherent parallelism of applications at execution time.

To improve programming productivity, the COMPSs programming model has following characteristics:

  • Agnostic of the actual computing infrastructure: COMPSs offers a model that abstracts the application from the underlying distributed infrastructure. Hence, COMPSs programs do not include any detail that could tie them to a particular platform, like deployment or resource management. This makes applications portable between infrastructures with diverse characteristics.

  • Single memory and storage space: the memory and file system space is also abtracted in COMPSs, giving the illusion that a single memory space and single file system is available. The runtime takes care of all the necessary data transfers.

  • Standard programming languages: COMPSs is based on the popular programming language Java, but also offers language bindings for Python (PyCOMPSs) and C/C++ applications. This makes it easier to learn the model since programmers can reuse most of their previous knowledge.

  • No APIs: In the case of COMPSs applications in Java, the model does not require to use any special API call, pragma or construct in the application; everything is pure standard Java syntax and libraries. With regard the Python and C/C++ bindings, a small set of API calls should be used on the COMPSs applications.

This manual is divided in 12 sections: