13,139 research outputs found
Taking advantage of hybrid systems for sparse direct solvers via task-based runtimes
The ongoing hardware evolution exhibits an escalation in the number, as well
as in the heterogeneity, of computing resources. The pressure to maintain
reasonable levels of performance and portability forces application developers
to leave the traditional programming paradigms and explore alternative
solutions. PaStiX is a parallel sparse direct solver, based on a dynamic
scheduler for modern hierarchical manycore architectures. In this paper, we
study the benefits and limits of replacing the highly specialized internal
scheduler of the PaStiX solver with two generic runtime systems: PaRSEC and
StarPU. The tasks graph of the factorization step is made available to the two
runtimes, providing them the opportunity to process and optimize its traversal
in order to maximize the algorithm efficiency for the targeted hardware
platform. A comparative study of the performance of the PaStiX solver on top of
its native internal scheduler, PaRSEC, and StarPU frameworks, on different
execution environments, is performed. The analysis highlights that these
generic task-based runtimes achieve comparable results to the
application-optimized embedded scheduler on homogeneous platforms. Furthermore,
they are able to significantly speed up the solver on heterogeneous
environments by taking advantage of the accelerators while hiding the
complexity of their efficient manipulation from the programmer.Comment: Heterogeneity in Computing Workshop (2014
A Graph-Partition-Based Scheduling Policy for Heterogeneous Architectures
In order to improve system performance efficiently, a number of systems
choose to equip multi-core and many-core processors (such as GPUs). Due to
their discrete memory these heterogeneous architectures comprise a distributed
system within a computer. A data-flow programming model is attractive in this
setting for its ease of expressing concurrency. Programmers only need to define
task dependencies without considering how to schedule them on the hardware.
However, mapping the resulting task graph onto hardware efficiently remains a
challenge. In this paper, we propose a graph-partition scheduling policy for
mapping data-flow workloads to heterogeneous hardware. According to our
experiments, our graph-partition-based scheduling achieves comparable
performance to conventional queue-base approaches.Comment: Presented at DATE Friday Workshop on Heterogeneous Architectures and
Design Methods for Embedded Image Systems (HIS 2015) (arXiv:1502.07241
TANGO: Transparent heterogeneous hardware Architecture deployment for eNergy Gain in Operation
The paper is concerned with the issue of how software systems actually use
Heterogeneous Parallel Architectures (HPAs), with the goal of optimizing power
consumption on these resources. It argues the need for novel methods and tools
to support software developers aiming to optimise power consumption resulting
from designing, developing, deploying and running software on HPAs, while
maintaining other quality aspects of software to adequate and agreed levels. To
do so, a reference architecture to support energy efficiency at application
construction, deployment, and operation is discussed, as well as its
implementation and evaluation plans.Comment: Part of the Program Transformation for Programmability in
Heterogeneous Architectures (PROHA) workshop, Barcelona, Spain, 12th March
2016, 7 pages, LaTeX, 3 PNG figure
Programming MPSoC platforms: Road works ahead
This paper summarizes a special session on multicore/multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC) programming challenges. The current trend towards MPSoC platforms in most computing domains does not only mean a radical change in computer architecture. Even more important from a SW developer´s viewpoint, at the same time the classical sequential von Neumann programming model needs to be overcome. Efficient utilization of the MPSoC HW resources demands for radically new models and corresponding SW development tools, capable of exploiting the available parallelism and guaranteeing bug-free parallel SW. While several standards are established in the high-performance computing domain (e.g. OpenMP), it is clear that more innovations are required for successful\ud
deployment of heterogeneous embedded MPSoC. On the other hand, at least for coming years, the freedom for disruptive programming technologies is limited by the huge amount of certified sequential code that demands for a more pragmatic, gradual tool and code replacement strategy
pocl: A Performance-Portable OpenCL Implementation
OpenCL is a standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems. The
benefits of a common programming standard are clear; multiple vendors can
provide support for application descriptions written according to the standard,
thus reducing the program porting effort. While the standard brings the obvious
benefits of platform portability, the performance portability aspects are
largely left to the programmer. The situation is made worse due to multiple
proprietary vendor implementations with different characteristics, and, thus,
required optimization strategies.
In this paper, we propose an OpenCL implementation that is both portable and
performance portable. At its core is a kernel compiler that can be used to
exploit the data parallelism of OpenCL programs on multiple platforms with
different parallel hardware styles. The kernel compiler is modularized to
perform target-independent parallel region formation separately from the
target-specific parallel mapping of the regions to enable support for various
styles of fine-grained parallel resources such as subword SIMD extensions, SIMD
datapaths and static multi-issue. Unlike previous similar techniques that work
on the source level, the parallel region formation retains the information of
the data parallelism using the LLVM IR and its metadata infrastructure. This
data can be exploited by the later generic compiler passes for efficient
parallelization.
The proposed open source implementation of OpenCL is also platform portable,
enabling OpenCL on a wide range of architectures, both already commercialized
and on those that are still under research. The paper describes how the
portability of the implementation is achieved. Our results show that most of
the benchmarked applications when compiled using pocl were faster or close to
as fast as the best proprietary OpenCL implementation for the platform at hand.Comment: This article was published in 2015; it is now openly accessible via
arxi
Autonomic Cloud Computing: Open Challenges and Architectural Elements
As Clouds are complex, large-scale, and heterogeneous distributed systems,
management of their resources is a challenging task. They need automated and
integrated intelligent strategies for provisioning of resources to offer
services that are secure, reliable, and cost-efficient. Hence, effective
management of services becomes fundamental in software platforms that
constitute the fabric of computing Clouds. In this direction, this paper
identifies open issues in autonomic resource provisioning and presents
innovative management techniques for supporting SaaS applications hosted on
Clouds. We present a conceptual architecture and early results evidencing the
benefits of autonomic management of Clouds.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, conference keynote pape
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