The OCR-Vx experience: lessons learned from designing and implementing a task-based runtime system

Task-based runtime systems are an important branch of parallel programming research, since tasks decouple computation from the compute units, giving the runtime systems greater flexibility than a thread-based solution. This makes it easier to deal with the ever-increasing complexity of parallel arch...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of supercomputing Vol. 78; no. 10; pp. 12344 - 12379
Main Authors: Dokulil, Jiri, Benkner, Siegfried
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York Springer US 01.07.2022
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:
Compilers
Computer Science
Distributed memory
Interpreters
Parallel programming
Processor Architectures
Programming Languages
Run time (computers)
Specifications
Synchronism
Task scheduling
Parallel computing
Task-based runtime systems
Open Community Runtime
Non-uniform memory access
ISSN:0920-8542, 1573-0484
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Task-based runtime systems are an important branch of parallel programming research, since tasks decouple computation from the compute units, giving the runtime systems greater flexibility than a thread-based solution. This makes it easier to deal with the ever-increasing complexity of parallel architectures by providing a separation of concerns—the specification of parallelism is separated from the implementation of the parallel computations on a specific architecture. The Open Community Runtime is one such system, aimed at large-scale parallel systems. Unlike many other task-based runtime systems, the creators not only provided an implementation but there is also a comprehensive specification document. This has allowed us to create an independent implementation, called OCR-Vx. In this article, we present our experience of developing the runtime system, put our work in the context of the specification and the other implementations, and describe key lessons that we have learned during our work. We discuss the design and implementation issues of task-based runtime systems and applications including task synchronization and scheduling, data management, memory consistency, the relation between shared-memory and distributed-memory runtime systems, NUMA architectures, and heterogeneous systems. The article is aimed at audiences not familiar with OCR, since we believe these lessons could be valuable for developers working on other task-based runtime systems or designing new ones.
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ISSN:0920-8542
1573-0484
DOI:10.1007/s11227-022-04355-0