Performance portability on EARTH: a case study across several parallel architectures

  • Authors:

  • Weirong Zhu;Yanwei Niu;Guang R. Gao

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Delaware, Newark, USA 19716;Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Delaware, Newark, USA 19716;Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Delaware, Newark, USA 19716

  • Venue:
  • Cluster Computing
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Due to the increase of the diversity of parallel architectures, and the increasing development time for parallel applications, performance portability has become one of the major considerations when designing the next generation of parallel program execution models, APIs, and runtime system software. This paper analyzes both code portability and performance portability of parallel programs for fine-grained multi-threaded execution and architecture models. We concentrate on one particular event-driven fine-grained multi-threaded execution model--EARTH, and discuss several design considerations of the EARTH model and runtime system that contribute to the performance portability of parallel applications. We believe that these are important issues for future high end computing system software design. Four representative benchmarks were conducted on several different parallel architectures, including two clusters listed in the 23rd supercomputer TOP500 list. The results demonstrate that EARTH based programs can achieve robust performance portability across the selected hardware platforms without any code modification or tuning.