Dynamic Stencil: Effective exploitation of run-time resources in reconfigurable clusters

Abstract

Computing nodes in reconfigurable clusters are occupied and released by applications during their execution. At compile time, application developers are not aware of the amount of resources available at run time. Dynamic Stencil is an approach that optimises stencil applications by constructing scalable designs which can adapt to available run-time resources in a reconfigurable cluster. This approach has three stages: compile-time optimisation, run-time initialisation, and run-time scaling, and can be used in developing effective servers for stencil computation. Reverse-Time Migration, a high-performance stencil application, is developed with the proposed approach. Experimental results show that high throughput and significant resource utilisation can be achieved with Dynamic Stencil designs, which can dynamically scale into nodes becoming available during their execution. When statically optimised and initialised, the Dynamic Stencil design is 1.8 to 88 times faster and 1.7 to 92 times more power efficient than reference CPU, GPU, MaxGenFD, Blue Gene/P, Blue Gene/Q and Cray XK6 designs; when dynamically scaled, resource utilisation of the design reaches 91%, which is 1.8 to 2.3 times higher than their static counterparts.