Mapple: A Domain-Specific Language for Mapping Distributed Programs

Abstract

Optimizing parallel programs for distributed systems is a complex task, often requiring significant code modifications. Task-based programming systems improve modularity by separating performance decisions from application logic, but their mapping interfaces are low-level. We introduce Mapple, a high-level, declarative programming interface for mapping distributed applications. Mapple provides transformation primitives to resolve dimensionality mismatches between task and processor spaces, including a key primitive, decompose, that helps minimize communication volume. We implement Mapple on top of the Legion runtime by translating Mapple mappers into its low-level C++ interface. Across nine applications, including six matrix multiplication algorithms and three scientific computing workloads, Mapple reduces mapper code size by 14x and enables performance improvements of up to 1.34x over expert-written C++ mappers. In addition, the decompose primitive achieves up to 1.83x improvement over existing dimensionality-resolution heuristics.