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    Extending the Nested Parallel Model to the Nested Dataflow Model with Provably Efficient Schedulers

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    The nested parallel (a.k.a. fork-join) model is widely used for writing parallel programs. However, the two composition constructs, i.e. "\parallel" (parallel) and ";;" (serial), are insufficient in expressing "partial dependencies" or "partial parallelism" in a program. We propose a new dataflow composition construct "\leadsto" to express partial dependencies in algorithms in a processor- and cache-oblivious way, thus extending the Nested Parallel (NP) model to the \emph{Nested Dataflow} (ND) model. We redesign several divide-and-conquer algorithms ranging from dense linear algebra to dynamic-programming in the ND model and prove that they all have optimal span while retaining optimal cache complexity. We propose the design of runtime schedulers that map ND programs to multicore processors with multiple levels of possibly shared caches (i.e, Parallel Memory Hierarchies) and provide theoretical guarantees on their ability to preserve locality and load balance. For this, we adapt space-bounded (SB) schedulers for the ND model. We show that our algorithms have increased "parallelizability" in the ND model, and that SB schedulers can use the extra parallelizability to achieve asymptotically optimal bounds on cache misses and running time on a greater number of processors than in the NP model. The running time for the algorithms in this paper is O(i=0h1Q(t;σMi)Cip)O\left(\frac{\sum_{i=0}^{h-1} Q^{*}({\mathsf t};\sigma\cdot M_i)\cdot C_i}{p}\right), where QQ^{*} is the cache complexity of task t{\mathsf t}, CiC_i is the cost of cache miss at level-ii cache which is of size MiM_i, σ(0,1)\sigma\in(0,1) is a constant, and pp is the number of processors in an hh-level cache hierarchy

    A Review of Lightweight Thread Approaches for High Performance Computing

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    High-level, directive-based solutions are becoming the programming models (PMs) of the multi/many-core architectures. Several solutions relying on operating system (OS) threads perfectly work with a moderate number of cores. However, exascale systems will spawn hundreds of thousands of threads in order to exploit their massive parallel architectures and thus conventional OS threads are too heavy for that purpose. Several lightweight thread (LWT) libraries have recently appeared offering lighter mechanisms to tackle massive concurrency. In order to examine the suitability of LWTs in high-level runtimes, we develop a set of microbenchmarks consisting of commonly-found patterns in current parallel codes. Moreover, we study the semantics offered by some LWT libraries in order to expose the similarities between different LWT application programming interfaces. This study reveals that a reduced set of LWT functions can be sufficient to cover the common parallel code patterns andthat those LWT libraries perform better than OS threads-based solutions in cases where task and nested parallelism are becoming more popular with new architectures.The researchers from the Universitat Jaume I de Castelló were supported by project TIN2014-53495-R of the MINECO, the Generalitat Valenciana fellowship programme Vali+d 2015, and FEDER. This work was partially supported by the U.S. Dept. of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (SC-21), under contract DEAC02-06CH11357. We gratefully acknowledge the computing resources provided and operated by the Joint Laboratory for System Evaluation (JLSE) at Argonne National Laboratory.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
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