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Negative Perceptions About the Applicability of Source-to-Source Compilers in HPC: A Literature Review

Milewicz, Reed M.; Pirkelbauer, Peter; Soundararajan, Prema; Ahmed, Hadia; Skjellum, Tony

A source-to-source compiler is a type of translator that accepts the source code of a program written in a programming language as its input and produces an equivalent source code in the same or different programming language. S2S techniques are commonly used to enable fluent translation between high-level programming languages, to perform large-scale refactoring operations, and to facilitate instrumentation for dynamic analysis. Negative perceptions about S2S’s applicability in High Performance Computing (HPC) are studied and evaluated here. This is a first study that brings to light reasons why scientists do not use source-to-source techniques for HPC. The primary audience for this paper are those considering S2S technology in their HPC application work.