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Shared memory parallel programming models strive to provide low-overhead execution environments. Task-based programming models, in particular, are well-suited to cope with the ubiquitous multi- and many-core systems since they allow applications to express all available concurrency to a scheduler, which is tasked with exploiting the available hardware resources. It is general consensus that atomic operations should be preferred over locks and mutexes to avoid inter-thread serialization and the resulting loss in efficiency. However, even atomic operations may serialize threads if not used judiciously. In this work, we will discuss several optimizations applied to TTG and the underlying PaRSEC runtime system aiming at removing contentious atomic operations to reduce the overhead of task management to a few hundred clock cycles. The result is an optimized data-flow programming system that seamlessly scales from a single node to distributed execution and which is able to compete with OpenMP in shared memory.
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Protecting Synchronization Mechanisms of Parallel Big Data Kernels via Logging
With the growing effort to reduce power consumption in machines, fault tolerance becomes more of a concern. This holds particularly for large-scale computing, where execution failures due to soft faults waste excessive time and resources. These large-scale applications are normally parallel in nature and rely on control structures tailored specifically for parallel computing, such as locks and barriers. While there are many studies on resilient software, to our knowledge none of them focus on protecting these parallel control structures. In this work, we present a method of ensuring the correct operation of both locks and barriers in parallel applications. Our method tracks the memory locations used within parallel sections and detects a violation of the control structures. Upon detecting any violation, the violating thread is rolled back to the beginning of the structure and reattempts it, similar to rollback mechanisms in transactional memory systems. We test the method on representative samples of the BigDataBench kernels and find it exhibits a mean error reduction of 93.6% for basic mutex locks and barriers with a mean 6.55% execution time overhead at 64 threads. Additionally, we provide a comparison to transactional memory methods and demonstrate up to a mean 57.5% execution time overhead reduction.
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- PAR ID:
- 10338355
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Transactions on Computers
- ISSN:
- 0018-9340
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 1
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2021.3122993
