Achieving High Performance on Supercomputers with a Sequential Task-based Programming Model

The emergence of accelerators as standard computing resources on supercomputers and the subsequent architectural complexity increase revived the need for high-level parallel programming paradigms. Sequential task-based programming model has been shown to efficiently meet this challenge on a single m...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems p. 1
Main Authors: Agullo, Emmanuel, Aumage, Olivier, Faverge, Mathieu, Furmento, Nathalie, Pruvost, Florent, Sergent, Marc, Thibault, Samuel Paul
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 18.12.2017
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Subjects:
Algorithm design and analysis
Cholesky factorization
Computer Science
distributed computing
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
GPU
heterogeneous computing
Libraries
multicore
Productivity
Programming
Runtime
runtime system
sequential task flow
Supercomputers
task-based programming
task-based programming
heterogeneous computing
GPU
multicore
Cholesky factorization
distributed computing
runtime system
sequential task flow
ISSN:1045-9219, 1558-2183
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The emergence of accelerators as standard computing resources on supercomputers and the subsequent architectural complexity increase revived the need for high-level parallel programming paradigms. Sequential task-based programming model has been shown to efficiently meet this challenge on a single multicore node possibly enhanced with accelerators, which motivated its support in the OpenMP 4.0 standard. In this paper, we show that this paradigm can also be employed to achieve high performance on modern supercomputers composed of multiple such nodes, with extremely limited changes in the user code. To prove this claim, we have extended the StarPU runtime system with an advanced inter-node data management layer that supports this model by posting communications automatically. We illustrate our discussion with the task-based tile Cholesky algorithm that we implemented on top of this new runtime system layer. We show that it allows for very high productivity while achieving a performance competitive with both the pure Message Passing Interface (MPI)-based ScaLAPACK Cholesky reference implementation and the DPLASMA Cholesky code, which implements another (non sequential) task-based programming paradigm.
ISSN:1045-9219
1558-2183
DOI:10.1109/TPDS.2017.2766064