Argobots: A Lightweight Low-Level Threading and Tasking Framework

Journal Article · Thu Mar 01 00:00:00 EST 2018 · IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2017.2766062· OSTI ID:1439019

Seo, Sangmin ; Amer, Abdelhalim ; Balaji, Pavan; Bordage, Cyril; Bosilca, George ; Brooks, Alex; Carns, Philip; Castello, Adrian ; Genet, Damien ; Herault, Thomas; Iwasaki, Shintaro; Jindal, Prateek ; Kale, Laxmikant V.; Krishnamoorthy, Sriram; Lifflander, Jonathan; Lu, Huiwei; Meneses, Esteban; Snir, Marc ; Sun, Yanhua; Taura, Kenjiro ; Beckman, Pete

In the past few decades, a number of user-level threading and tasking models have been proposed in the literature to address the shortcomings of OS-level threads, primarily with respect to cost and flexibility. Current state-of-the-art user-level threading and tasking models, however, are either too specific to applications or architectures or are not as powerful or flexible. In this paper, we present Argobots, a lightweight, low-level threading and tasking framework that is designed as a portable and performant substrate for high-level programming models or runtime systems. Argobots offers a carefully designed execution model that balances generality of functionality with providing a rich set of controls to allow specialization by the user or high-level programming model. We describe the design, implementation, and optimization of Argobots and present integrations with three example high-level models: OpenMP, MPI, and co-located I/O service. Evaluations show that (1) Argobots outperforms existing generic threading runtimes; (2) our OpenMP runtime offers more efficient interoperability capabilities than production OpenMP runtimes do; (3) when MPI interoperates with Argobots instead of Pthreads, it enjoys reduced synchronization costs and better latency hiding capabilities; and (4) I/O service with Argobots reduces interference with co-located applications, achieving performance competitive with that of the Pthreads version.

• Research Organization: Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-76RL01830
• OSTI ID: 1439019
• Report Number(s): PNNL-SA-130264; KJ0402000
• Journal Information: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Vol. 29, Issue 3; ISSN 1045-9219
• Publisher: IEEE
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English