I will describe recent work in two projects aimed at reducing the impact
of steadily increasing communication costs on scalable systems. The first
is UPC++,  a C++ PGAS library that leverages the GASNet-EX communication
library to deliver close to the metal communication performance. The second
is MATE, a domain specific translator that restructures MPI applications to
tolerate communication by hiding it behind available communication. The
benefit of UPC++ comes from its support for one-sided communication
and remote procedure call. The performance of MATE's translated code is
competitive with that of manual restructuring.