In this paper we present the Task-Aware MPI library (TAMPI) that integrates both blocking and non-blocking MPI primitives with task-based programming models. The TAMPI library leverages two new runtime APIs to improve both programmability and performance of hybrid applications. The first API allows to pause and resume the execution of a task depending on external events. This API is used to improve the interoperability between blocking MPI communication primitives and tasks. When an MPI operation executed inside a task blocks, the task running is paused so that the runtime system can schedule a new task on the core that became idle. Once the blocked MPI operation is completed, the paused task is put again on the runtime system's ready queue, so eventually it will be scheduled again and its execution will be resumed.The second API defers the release of dependencies associated with a task completion until some external events are fulfilled. This API is composed only of two functions, one to bind external events to a running task and another function to notify about the completion of external events previously bound. TAMPI leverages this API to bind non-blocking MPI operations with tasks, deferring the release of their task dependencies until both task execution and all its bound MPI operations are completed.Our experiments reveal that the enhanced features of TAMPI not only simplify the development of hybrid MPI+OpenMP applications that use blocking or non-blocking MPI primitives but they also naturally overlap computation and communication phases, which improves application performance and scalability by removing artificial dependencies across communication tasks.
The tasking model of OpenMP 4.0 supports both nesting and the definition of dependences between sibling tasks. A natural way to parallelize many codes with tasks is to first taskify the high-level functions and then to further refine these tasks with additional subtasks. However, this top-down approach has some drawbacks since combining nesting with dependencies usually requires additional measures to enforce the correct coordination of dependencies across nesting levels. For instance, most non-leaf tasks need to include a taskwait at the end of their code. While these measures enforce the correct order of execution, as a side effect, they also limit the discovery of parallelism. In this paper we extend the OpenMP tasking model to improve the integration of nesting and dependencies. Our proposal builds on both formulas, nesting and dependencies, and benefits from their individual strengths. On one hand, it encourages a top-down approach to parallelizing codes that also enables the parallel instantiation of tasks. On the other hand, it allows the runtime to control dependencies at a fine grain that until now was only possible using a single domain of dependencies. Our proposal is realized through additions to the OpenMP task directive that ensure backward compatibility with current codes. We have implemented a new runtime with these extensions and used it to evaluate the impact on several benchmarks. Our initial findings show that our extensions improve performance in three areas. First, they expose more parallelism. Second, they uncover dependencies across nesting levels, which allows the runtime to make better scheduling decisions. And third, they allow the parallel instantiation of tasks with dependencies between them.
In this paper we propose an API to pause and resume task execution depending on external events. We leverage this generic API to improve the interoperability between MPI synchronous communication primitives and tasks. When an MPI operation blocks, the task running is paused so that the runtime system can schedule a new task on the core that became idle. Once the MPI operation is completed, the paused task is put again on the runtime system's ready queue. We expose our proposal through a new MPI threading level which we implement through two approaches.The first approach is an MPI wrapper library that works with any MPI implementation by intercepting MPI synchronous calls, implementing them on top of their asynchronous counterparts. In this case, the task-based runtime system is also extended to periodically check for pending MPI operations and resume the corresponding tasks once MPI operations complete. The second approach consists in directly modifying the MPICH runtime system, a well-known implementation of MPI, to directly call the pause/resume API when a synchronous MPI operation blocks and completes, respectively.Our experiments reveal that this proposal not only simplifies the development of hybrid MPI+OpenMP applications that naturally overlap computation and communication phases; it also improves application performance and scalability by removing artificial dependencies across communication tasks. Using the comm thread approach of the hybrid MPI+SMPSs programming model [9], authors allowed to exploit distant parallelism separated by taskified MPI calls. These tasks were also identified as communication tasks and were executed by an additional thread called communication thread. The runtime's task scheduler could reorder the execution of communication and computational tasks in such a way that communication can happen as soon as possible, increasing the parallelism within and across MPI processes. That proposal requires changes to the programming model to allow to identify ahead of time those tasks that have blocking-like behavior. In addition, only one thread can execute them, and it must do so in sequential order. Hence, this solution
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