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Computer scientists and programmers face the difficultly of improving the scalability of their applications while using conventional programming techniques only. As a base-line hypothesis of this paper we assume that an advanced runtime system can be used to take full advantage of the available parallel resources of a machine in order to achieve the highest parallelism possible. In this paper we present the capabilities of HPX - a distributed runtime system for parallel applications of any scale - to achieve the best possible scalability through asynchronous task execution [1]. OP2 is an active library which provides a framework for the parallel execution for unstructured grid applications on different multi-core/many-core hardware architectures [2]. OP2 generates code which uses OpenMP for loop parallelization within an application code for both single-threaded and multi-threaded machines. In this work we modify the OP2 code generator to target HPX instead of OpenMP, i.e. port the parallel simulation backend of OP2 to utilize HPX. We compare the performance results of the different parallelization methods using HPX and OpenMP for loop parallelization within the Airfoil application. The results of strong scaling and weak scaling tests for the Airfoil application on one node with up to 32 threads are presented. Using HPX for parallelization of OP2 gives an improvement in performance by 5%-21%. By modifying the OP2 code generator to use HPX's parallel algorithms, we observe scaling improvements by about 5% as compared to OpenMP. To fully exploit the potential of HPX, we adapted the OP2 API to expose a future and dataflow based programming model and applied this technique for parallelizing the same Airfoil application. We show that the dataflow oriented programming model, which automatically creates an execution tree representing the algorithmic data dependencies of our application, improves the overall scaling results by about 21% compared to OpenMP. Our results show the advantage of using the asynchronous programming model implemented by HPX. 

One of the major challenges in parallelization is the difficulty of improving application scalability with conventional techniques. HPX provides efficient scalable parallelism by significantly reducing node starvation and effective latencies while controlling the overheads. In this paper, we present a new highly scalable parallel distributed N-Body application using a future-based algorithm, which is implemented with HPX. The main difference between this algorithm and prior art is that a future-based request buffer is used between different nodes and along each spatial direction to send/receive data to/from the remote nodes, which helps removing synchronization barriers. HPX provides an asynchronous programming model which results in improving the parallel performance. The results of using HPX for parallelizing Octree construction on one node and the force computation on the distributed nodes show the scalability improvement on an average by about 45% compared to an equivalent OpenMP implementation and 28% compared to a hybrid implementation (MPI+OpenMP) [1] respectively for one billion particles running on up to 128 nodes with 20 cores per each.