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Nexus#: a distributed hardware task manager for task-based programming models
Dallou, Tamer; Engelhardt, Nina; Elhossini, Ahmed; Juurlink, Ben
In the era of multicore systems, it is expected that the number of cores that can be integrated on a single chip will be 3-digit. The key to utilize such a huge computational power is to extract the very fine parallelism in the user program. This is non-trivial for the average programmer, and becomes very hard as the number of potential parallel instances increases. Task-based programming models such as OmpSs are promising, since they handle the detection of dependencies and synchronization for the programmer. However, state-of-the-art research shows that task management is not cheap, and introduces a significant overhead that limits the scalability of OmpSs. Nexus# is a hardware accelerator for the OmpSs runtime system, which dynamically monitors dependencies between tasks. It is fully synthesizable in VHDL, and has a distributed task graph model to achieve the best scalability. Supporting tasks with arbitrary number of parameters and any dependency pattern, Nexus# achieves better performance than Nanos, the official OmpSs runtime system, and scales well for the H264dec benchmark with very fine grained tasks, among other benchmarks from the Starbench suite.
Published in: 2015 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium : IPDPS, 10.1109/IPDPS.2015.79, IEEE
