An OpenMP Runtime for Transparent Work Sharing across Cache-Incoherent Heterogeneous Nodes

Abstract

In this work, we present libHetMP, an OpenMP runtime for automatically and transparently distributing parallel computation across heterogeneous nodes. libHetMP targets platforms comprising CPUs with different instruction set architectures (ISA) coupled by a high-speed memory interconnect, where cross-ISA binary incompatibility and non-coherent caches require application data be marshaled to be shared across CPUs. Because of this, work distribution decisions must take into account both relative compute performance of asymmetric CPUs and communication overheads. libHetMP drives workload distribution decisions without programmer intervention by measuring performance characteristics during cross-node execution. A novel HetProbe loop iteration scheduler decides if cross-node execution is beneficial and either distributes work according to the relative performance of CPUs when it is or places all work on the set of homogeneous CPUs providing the best performance when it is not. We evaluate libHetMP using compute kernels from several OpenMP benchmark suites and show a geometric mean 41% speedup in execution time across asymmetric CPUs. Because some workloads may showcase irregular behavior among iterations, we extend libHetMP with a second scheduler called HetProbe-I. The evaluation of HetProbe-I shows it can further improve speedup for irregular computation, in some cases up to a 24%, by triggering periodic distribution decisions.