Local and Global Shared Memory for Task Based HPC Applications on Heterogeneous Platforms
Chao Liu, Miriam E. Leeser · 2018
With the prevalence of multicore and manycore processors, developing parallel applications to benefit from massively parallel resources is important. In this work, we introduce a hybrid shared memory mechanism based on a high-level task design. We implemented task scoped global shared data based on the one-sided communication feature of MPI-3 and enable users to implement and create multi-threaded tasks that can execute either on a single node or on multiple nodes. Task threads of distributed nodes can share data sets through global shared data objects using one-sided remote memory access. We ported and developed a set of benchmark applications and tested on a cluster platform. The high-level task design and hybrid shared memory help users develop and maintain parallel programs easily, and the results show that the global shared data can deliver good RMA performance; the multi-threaded task implementations perform up to 20% faster than ordinary OpenMP programs and have better scaling performance than MPI programs on multiple nodes.