Collaborative execution environment for heterogeneous parallel systems

Abstract

Nowadays, commodity computers are complex heterogeneous systems that provide a huge amount of computational power. However, to take advantage of this power we have to orchestrate the use of processing units with different characteristics. Such distributed memory systems make use of relatively slow interconnection networks, such as system buses. Therefore, most of the time we only individually take advantage of the central processing unit (CPU) or processing accelerators, which are simpler homogeneous subsystems. In this paper we propose a collaborative execution environment for exploiting data parallelism in a heterogeneous system. It is shown that this environment can be applied to program both CPU and graphics processing units (GPUs) to collaboratively compute matrix multiplication and fast Fourier transform (FFT). Experimental results show that significant performance benefits are achieved when both CPU and GPU are used.