Task parallel assembly language for uncompromising parallelism
Mike Rainey, Ryan Newton, Kyle C. Hale, Nikos Hardavellas, Simone Campanoni, Peter A. Dinda, Umut A. Acar · 2021
Achieving parallel performance and scalability involves making compromises between parallel and sequential computation. If not contained, the overheads of parallelism can easily outweigh its benefits, sometimes by orders of magnitude. Today, we expect programmers to implement this compromise by optimizing their code manually. This process is labor intensive, requires deep expertise, and reduces code quality. Recent work on heartbeat scheduling shows a promising approach that manifests the potentially vast amounts of available, latent parallelism, at a regular rate, based on even beats in time. The idea is to amortize the overheads of parallelism over the useful work performed between the beats. Heartbeat scheduling is promising in theory, but the reality is complicated: it has no known practical implementation.