Journal
PARALLEL COMPUTING
Volume 33, Issue 10-11, Pages 700-719Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
DOI: 10.1016/j.parco.2007.09.004
Keywords
heterogeneous multi-core processors; accelerator-based parallel architectures; runtime systems for parallel programming; Cell broadband engine
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We explore runtime mechanisms and policies for scheduling dynamic multi-grain parallelism on heterogeneous multicore processors. Heterogeneous multi-core processors integrate conventional cores that run legacy codes with specialized cores that serve as computational accelerators. The term multi-grain parallelism refers to the exposure of multiple dimensions of parallelism from within the runtime system, so as to best exploit a parallel architecture with heterogeneous computational capabilities between its cores and execution units. We investigate user-level schedulers that dynamically rightsize the dimensions and degrees of parallelism on the cell broadband engine. The schedulers address the problem of mapping application-specific concurrency to an architecture with multiple hardware layers of parallelism, without requiring programmer intervention or sophisticated compiler support. We evaluate recently introduced schedulers for event-driven execution and utilization-driven dynamic multi-grain parallelization on Cell. We also present a new scheduling scheme for dynamic multi-grain parallelism, S-MGPS, which uses sampling of dominant execution phases to converge to the optimal scheduling algorithm. We evaluate S-MGPS on an IBM Cell BladeCenter with two realistic bioinformatics applications that infer large phylogenies. S-MGPS performs within 2-10% of the optimal scheduling algorithm in these applications, while exhibiting low overhead and little sensitivity to application-dependent parameters. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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