In this work-in-progress research paper, we make the case for using Rust to develop applications in the High Performance Computing (HPC) domain which is critically dependent on native C/C++ libraries. This work explores one example of Safe HPC via the design of a Rust interface to an existing distributed C++ Actors library. This existing library has been shown to deliver high performance to C++ developers of irregular Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) applications.
Our key contribution is a proof-of-concept framework to express parallel programs safe-ly in Rust (and potentially other languages/systems), along with a corresponding study of the problems solved by our runtime, the implementation challenges faced, and user productivity. We also conducted an early evaluation of our approach by converting C++ actor implementations of four applications taken from the Bale kernels to Rust Actors using our framework. Our results show that the productivity benefits of our approach are significant since our Rust-based approach helped catch bugs statically during application development, without degrading performance relative to the original C++ actor versions.
