FQL: An Extensible Feature Query Language and Toolkit on Searching Software Characteristics for HPC Applications

Abstract

The amount of large-scale scientific computing software is dramatically increasing. In this work, we designed a new query language, named Feature Query Language (FQL), to collect and extract HPC-related software features or metadata from a quick static code analysis. We also designed and implemented an FQL-based toolkit to automatically detect and present software features using an extensible query repository. A number of large-scale, high performance computing (HPC) scientific applications have been studied in the paper with the FQL toolkit to demonstrate the HPC-related feature extraction and information/metadata collection. Different from the existing static software analysis and refactoring tools which focus on software debug, development and code transformation, the FQL toolkit is simpler, significantly lightweight and strives to collect various and diverse software metadata with ease and rapidly.