34,497 research outputs found
Configurable Strategies for Work-stealing
Work-stealing systems are typically oblivious to the nature of the tasks they
are scheduling. For instance, they do not know or take into account how long a
task will take to execute or how many subtasks it will spawn. Moreover, the
actual task execution order is typically determined by the underlying task
storage data structure, and cannot be changed. There are thus possibilities for
optimizing task parallel executions by providing information on specific tasks
and their preferred execution order to the scheduling system.
We introduce scheduling strategies to enable applications to dynamically
provide hints to the task-scheduling system on the nature of specific tasks.
Scheduling strategies can be used to independently control both local task
execution order as well as steal order. In contrast to conventional scheduling
policies that are normally global in scope, strategies allow the scheduler to
apply optimizations on individual tasks. This flexibility greatly improves
composability as it allows the scheduler to apply different, specific
scheduling choices for different parts of applications simultaneously. We
present a number of benchmarks that highlight diverse, beneficial effects that
can be achieved with scheduling strategies. Some benchmarks (branch-and-bound,
single-source shortest path) show that prioritization of tasks can reduce the
total amount of work compared to standard work-stealing execution order. For
other benchmarks (triangle strip generation) qualitatively better results can
be achieved in shorter time. Other optimizations, such as dynamic merging of
tasks or stealing of half the work, instead of half the tasks, are also shown
to improve performance. Composability is demonstrated by examples that combine
different strategies, both within the same kernel (prefix sum) as well as when
scheduling multiple kernels (prefix sum and unbalanced tree search)
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Computer-aided programming for multiprocessing systems
As both the number of processors and the complexity of problems to be solved increase, programming multiprocessing systems becomes more difficult and error-prone. This report discusses parallel models of computation and tools for computer-aided programming (CAP). Program development tools are necessary since programmers are not able to develop complex parallel programs efficiently. In particular, a CAP tool, named Hypertool, is described here. It performs scheduling and handles the communication primitive insertion automatically so that many errors are eliminated. It also generates the performance estimates and other program quality measures to help programmers in improving their algorithms and programs. Experiments have shown that up to a 300% performance improvement can be achieved by computer-aided programming
Scheduling MapReduce Jobs under Multi-Round Precedences
We consider non-preemptive scheduling of MapReduce jobs with multiple tasks
in the practical scenario where each job requires several map-reduce rounds. We
seek to minimize the average weighted completion time and consider scheduling
on identical and unrelated parallel processors. For identical processors, we
present LP-based O(1)-approximation algorithms. For unrelated processors, the
approximation ratio naturally depends on the maximum number of rounds of any
job. Since the number of rounds per job in typical MapReduce algorithms is a
small constant, our scheduling algorithms achieve a small approximation ratio
in practice. For the single-round case, we substantially improve on previously
best known approximation guarantees for both identical and unrelated
processors. Moreover, we conduct an experimental analysis and compare the
performance of our algorithms against a fast heuristic and a lower bound on the
optimal solution, thus demonstrating their promising practical performance
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Chippe : a system for constraint driven behavioral synthesis
This report describes the Chippe system, gives some background previous work and describes several sample design runs of the system. Also presented are the sources of the design tradeoffs used by Chippe, and overview of the internal design model, and experiences using the system
Exploiting partial reconfiguration through PCIe for a microphone array network emulator
The current Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) technology enables the deployment of relatively low-cost wireless sensor networks composed of MEMS microphone arrays for accurate sound source localization. However, the evaluation and the selection of the most accurate and power-efficient network’s topology are not trivial when considering dynamic MEMS microphone arrays. Although software simulators are usually considered, they consist of high-computational intensive tasks, which require hours to days to be completed. In this paper, we present an FPGA-based platform to emulate a network of microphone arrays. Our platform provides a controlled simulated acoustic environment, able to evaluate the impact of different network configurations such as the number of microphones per array, the network’s topology, or the used detection method. Data fusion techniques, combining the data collected by each node, are used in this platform. The platform is designed to exploit the FPGA’s partial reconfiguration feature to increase the flexibility of the network emulator as well as to increase performance thanks to the use of the PCI-express high-bandwidth interface. On the one hand, the network emulator presents a higher flexibility by partially reconfiguring the nodes’ architecture in runtime. On the other hand, a set of strategies and heuristics to properly use partial reconfiguration allows the acceleration of the emulation by exploiting the execution parallelism. Several experiments are presented to demonstrate some of the capabilities of our platform and the benefits of using partial reconfiguration
Pregelix: Big(ger) Graph Analytics on A Dataflow Engine
There is a growing need for distributed graph processing systems that are
capable of gracefully scaling to very large graph datasets. Unfortunately, this
challenge has not been easily met due to the intense memory pressure imposed by
process-centric, message passing designs that many graph processing systems
follow. Pregelix is a new open source distributed graph processing system that
is based on an iterative dataflow design that is better tuned to handle both
in-memory and out-of-core workloads. As such, Pregelix offers improved
performance characteristics and scaling properties over current open source
systems (e.g., we have seen up to 15x speedup compared to Apache Giraph and up
to 35x speedup compared to distributed GraphLab), and makes more effective use
of available machine resources to support Big(ger) Graph Analytics
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