Weighted dynamic scheduling with many parallelism grains for offloading of numerical workloads to multiple varied accelerators

Abstract

A wide variety of heterogeneous compute resources are available to modern computers, including multiple sockets containing multicore CPUs, one-or-more GPUs of varying power, and coprocessors such as the Intel Xeon Phi. The challenge faced by domain scientists is how to efficiently and productively use these varied resources. For example, in order to use GPUs effectively, the workload must have a greater degree of parallelism than a workload designed for a multicore-CPU. The domain scientist would have to design and schedule an application in multiple degrees of parallelism and task grain sizes in order to obtain efficient performance from the resources. We propose a productive programming model starting from serial code, which achieves parallelism and scalability by using a task-superscalar runtime environment to adapt the computation to the available resources. The adaptation is done at multiple points, including multi-level data partitioning, adaptive task grain sizes, and dynamic task scheduling. The effectiveness of this approach for utilizing multi-way heterogeneous hardware resources is demonstrated by implementing dense linear algebra applications.