Cache size in a cost model for heterogeneous skeletons

• Authors: Khari Armih;Greg Michaelson;Phil Trinder
• Venue: Proceedings of the fifth international workshop on High-level parallel programming and applications
• Year: 2011

High performance architectures are increasingly heterogeneous with shared and distributed memory components. Programming such architectures is complicated and performance portability is a major issue as the architectures evolve. This paper proposes a new architectural cost model that accounts for cache size and improves on heterogeneous architectures, and demonstrates a skeleton-based programming model that simplifies programming heterogeneous architectures. We further demonstrate that the cost model can be exploited by skeletons to improve load balancing on heterogeneous architectures. The heterogeneous skeleton model facilitates performance portability, using the architectural cost model to automatically balance load across heterogeneous components of the architecture. For both a data parallel benchmark, and realistic image processing program we obtain good performance for the heterogeneous skeleton on homogeneous shared and distributed memory architectures, and on three heterogeneous architectures. We also show that taking cache size into account in the model leads to improved balance and performance.