On the adequacy of lightweight thread approaches for high-level parallel programming models

Journal Article · Wed Feb 21 00:00:00 EST 2018 · Future Generations Computer Systems

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2018.02.016· OSTI ID:1465734

Castelló, Adrián ^[1]; Mayo, Rafael ^[1]; Sala, Kevin  ^[2]; Beltran, Vicenç ^[2]; Balaji, Pavan ^[3]; Peña, Antonio J.  ^[2]

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1. Univ. Jaume I de Castelló (Spain)
2. Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Barcelona (Spain)
3. Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)

High-level parallel programming models (PMs) are becoming crucial in order to extract the computational power of current on-node multi-threaded parallelism. The most popular PMs, such as OpenMP or OmpSs, are directive-based: the complexity of the hardware is hidden by the underlying runtime system, improving coding productivity. The implementations of OpenMP usually rely on POSIX threads (pthreads), offering excellent performance for coarse-grained parallelism and a perfect match with the current hardware. OmpSs is a task oriented PM based on an ad hoc runtime solution called Nanos++; it is the precursor of the tasking parallelism in the OpenMP tasking specification. A recent trend in runtimes and applications points to leveraging massive on-node parallelism in conjunction with fine-grained and dynamic scheduling paradigms. In this paper we analyze the behavior of the OpenMP and OmpSs PMs on top of the recently emerged Generic Lightweight Threads (GLT) API. GLT exposses a common API for lightweight thread (LWT) libraries that offers the possibility of running the same application over different native LWT solutions. We describe the design details of those high-level PMs implemented on top of GLT and analyze different scenarios in order to assess where the use of LWTs may benefit application performance. Our work reveals those scenarios where LWTs overperform pthread-based solutions and compares the performance between an ad hoc solution and a generic implementation.

• Research Organization: Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (MINECO); USDOE Office of Science (SC), Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR)
• Grant/Contract Number: AC02-06CH11357; SC-21
• OSTI ID: 1465734
• Alternate ID(s): OSTI ID: 1634145
• Journal Information: Future Generations Computer Systems, Vol. 84, Issue C; ISSN 0167-739X
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
GLT
OmpSs
OpenMP
POSIX Threads
lightweight threads
programming models