A distributed OpenCL framework using redundant computation and data replication

Abstract

Applications written solely in OpenCL or CUDA cannot execute on a cluster as a whole. Most previous approaches that extend these programming models to clusters are based on a common idea: designating a centralized host node and coordinating the other nodes with the host for computation. However, the centralized host node is a serious performance bottleneck when the number of nodes is large. In this paper, we propose a scalable and distributed OpenCL framework called SnuCL-D for large-scale clusters. SnuCL-D's remote device virtualization provides an OpenCL application with an illusion that all compute devices in a cluster are confined in a single node. To reduce the amount of control-message and data communication between nodes, SnuCL-D replicates the OpenCL host program execution and data in each node. We also propose a new OpenCL host API function and a queueing optimization technique that significantly reduce the overhead incurred by the previous centralized approaches. To show the effectiveness of SnuCL-D, we evaluate SnuCL-D with a microbenchmark and eleven benchmark applications on a large-scale CPU cluster and a medium-scale GPU cluster.