A Novel Set of Directives for Multi-device Programming with OpenMP

Abstract

The latest versions of OpenMP have been offering support for offloading execution to the accelerator devices present in a variety of heterogeneous architectures via the target directives. However, these directives can only refer to one device at a time, which makes multi-device programming an explicit and tedious task. In this work, we present an extension of OpenMP in the form of a new set of directives (target spread directives) which offers direct support for multiple devices and allows the distribution of data and/or workload among them without explicit programming. This results in an additional level of parallelism between the host and the devices. The target spread directives were evaluated using the Somier micro-app in a PowerPC cluster node with up to four Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs. The results showed a speedup of approximately 2X using four GPUs and the new directive set, in comparison with the baseline implementation which used one GPU and the existing target directive set.