Designing a Modern Skeleton Programming Framework for Parallel and Heterogeneous Systems

Ernstsson, August

doi:10.3384/lic.diva-170194

Cited by 2 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 66 publications

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“…The author's licentiate thesis [57] was published about one year before this dissertation was finalized. In the Swedish postgraduate education system, a licentiate degree comprises 120 ECTS credits or two years of full-time studies, half of the 240 ECTS credits of a doctor's degree.…”

Section: Evaluation Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pattern-based Programming Abstractions for Heterogeneous Parallel Computing

Ernstsson

2022

Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Dissertations

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Contemporary computer architectures utilize wide multi-core processors, accelerators such as GPUs, and clustering of individual computers into complex large-scale systems. These hardware trends are prevalent across computers of all sizes, from the largest supercomputers down to the smallest mobile phones. While these innovations provide high peak computing performance, software developers find it increasingly difficult to effectively target all the processing resources without expert knowledge in parallelization, heterogeneous computing, communication, synchronization, and so on. To ensure that software can keep up with the development of hardware architectures, advanced high-level programming environments and frameworks are needed to bridge the programmability gap. In addition, as the industry is trending towards increased vertical integration of software development stacks, vendor lock-in presents a risk of coupling software projects to proprietary technologies. Combined with problems of technical debt in large-scale software systems, it is clear that portability and open source are desirable properties of high-level parallel programming environments. One example of a programming framework fulfilling the above criteria is SkePU, a framework for high-level data-parallel pattern programming consisting of a compiler toolchain, programming interface, and run-time system.The work presented in this thesis proposes a design of the pattern-centric skeleton programming model of the SkePU framework based on modern C++ with variadic template metaprogramming and state-of-the-art compiler technology. The design enables further flexibility, expressivity, and portability and gives rise to several new performance optimization techniques. The focus lies on a strong set of programming abstractions: providing new and extended patterns, improving the data access locality of existing ones, and using both static and dynamic knowledge about program flow. The work combines novel programming interfaces and implementations with practical evaluation on synthetic and real-world applications. Several contributions are results from international collaborations in application-framework co-design: a single-source parallelization approach of skeleton programs on heterogeneous clusters, an extension mechanism for inserting platform-optimized code variants in high-level skeleton programs, and an integrated abstraction for portable parallel deterministic random number generation. The work places a strong emphasis on programmability aspects to make heterogeneous parallel computing accessible to non-experts, while also providing sufficient performance and interface familiarity for the high-performance computing community. vi First and foremost I want to thank my supervisor at Linköping University (LiU), Professor Christoph Kessler, for continued and tireless efforts, experienced supervision, and caring friendship. Also thanks to my secondary supervisor José Daniel García Sánchez, professor at University Carlos III of Madrid and member of the ISO C+...

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Section: Evaluation Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pattern-based Programming Abstractions for Heterogeneous Parallel Computing

Ernstsson

2022

Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Dissertations

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“…The new features are the result of a co-design effort together with HPC application partners in the EXA2PRO project, and are geared towards improving programmability, flexibility, better performance, or several of these aspects, while keeping SkePU source code strictly portable and compatible with sequential C++11. We provide a sample of results from performance evaluation experiments; further results can be found in Ernstsson's licentiate thesis [13], which also goes into more detail on the design and implementation approach behind SkePU 3.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This section presents some performance evaluation of new SkePU 3 features; further performance results can be found in Ernstsson's licentiate thesis [13], such as an embedded ODE solver from the Libsolve library [18], solving the Brusselator 2D-MIX problem with 7 stage vectors, performing up to 124,532 calls to skeleton instances in total for the largest problem size, which we have omitted here due to lack of space.…”

Section: Performance Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

SkePU 3: Portable High-Level Programming of Heterogeneous Systems and HPC Clusters

Ernstsson

Ahlqvist

Zouzoula

et al. 2021

Int J Parallel Prog

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We present the third generation of the C++-based open-source skeleton programming framework SkePU. Its main new features include new skeletons, new data container types, support for returning multiple objects from skeleton instances and user functions, support for specifying alternative platform-specific user functions to exploit e.g. custom SIMD instructions, generalized scheduling variants for the multicore CPU backends, and a new cluster-backend targeting the custom MPI interface provided by the StarPU task-based runtime system. We have also revised the smart data containers’ memory consistency model for automatic data sharing between main and device memory. The new features are the result of a two-year co-design effort collecting feedback from HPC application partners in the EU H2020 project EXA2PRO, and target especially the HPC application domain and HPC platforms. We evaluate the performance effects of the new features on high-end multicore CPU and GPU systems and on HPC clusters.

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Designing a Modern Skeleton Programming Framework for Parallel and Heterogeneous Systems

Abstract: This is a Swedish Licentiate's Thesis Swedish postgraduate education leads to a doctor's degree and/or a licentiate's degree.A doctor's degree comprises 240 ECTS credits (4 years of full-time studies). A licentiate's degree comprises 120 ECTS credits.

Cited by 2 publications

References 66 publications

Pattern-based Programming Abstractions for Heterogeneous Parallel Computing

Pattern-based Programming Abstractions for Heterogeneous Parallel Computing

SkePU 3: Portable High-Level Programming of Heterogeneous Systems and HPC Clusters

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