Model-Driven One-Sided Factorizations on Multicore Accelerated Systems

Abstract

Hardware heterogeneity of the HPC platforms is no longer considered unusual but instead have become the most viable way forward towards Exascale. In fact, the multitude of the heterogeneous resources available to modern computers are designed for different workloads and their efficient use is closely aligned with the specialized role envisaged by their design. Commonly in order to efficiently use such GPU resources, the workload in question must have a much greater degree of parallelism than workloads often associated with multicore processors (CPUs). Available GPU variants differ in their internal architecture and, as a result, are capable of handling workloads of varying degrees of complexity and a range of computational patterns. This vast array of applicable workloads will likely lead to an ever accelerated mixing of multicore-CPUs and GPUs in multi-user environments with the ultimate goal of offering adequate computing facilities for a wide range of scientific and technical workloads. In the following paper, we present a research prototype that uses a lightweight runtime environment to manage the resource-specific workloads, and to control the dataflow and parallel execution in hybrid systems. Our lightweight runtime environment uses task superscalar concepts to enable the developer to write serial code while providing parallel execution. This concept is reminiscent of dataflow and systolic architectures in its conceptualization of a workload as a set of side-effect-free tasks that pass data items whenever the associated work assignment have been completed. Additionally, our task abstractions and their parametrization enable uniformity in the algorithmic development across all the heterogeneous resources without sacrificing precious compute cycles. We include performance results for dense linear algebra functions which demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of our approach that is aptly capable of full utilization of a wide range of accelerator hardware.