Research topic and goals
Task-based programming models are a promising approach to exploiting complex distributed and heterogeneous systems. Recently, these models have emerged as a viable alternative to traditional message-passing and fork-join approaches, reflecting the research community’s growing interest in their numerous benefits. Despite these advantages, the broader adoption within the scientific and industrial sectors remains limited. A major barrier is the poor interoperability among existing runtime systems, which prevents the development of complex applications through the integration of multiple components or libraries written in different task-based programming models. Such interoperability issues often lead to oversubscription, significantly impairing applications’ performance. Maintainability presents another significant challenge within task-based programming models, encountered by projects at varying stages. The relatively modest level of effort anticipated in a future steady-state raises critical questions about the sustainability of support for these models. Can the organization of software, potentially through the utilization of shared code bases for sub-components, facilitate easier maintenance? Such an approach could potentially streamline the support process, thereby enhancing the long-term viability and operational efficiency of task-based systems.
Our project aims to address these challenges by identifying the low-level primitives necessary for building efficient and scalable task-based runtime systems. Based on these findings, we will develop unified low-level tasking interfaces to enhance interoperability among different runtime systems, optimizing performance and encouraging broader adoption of task-based programming models.
Visits and meetings
We had a BoF session in the Kobe workshop, where we decided to start this project. There are no planned visits yet.
Impact and publications
- Solve interoperability problems between task-based programming models
- Increase software development productivity and reach of task-based programming models
- Research and document needs from higher-level programming systems (Charm++, HPX, Legion, OpenMP, OmpSs, ..) for the task-based execution systems
- Explore possibility of creating a standard that allows for different use cases currently served, either via a flexible design or allowing for extensions
Future plans
not defined yet.
References
- Álvarez, David, Kevin Sala, and Vicenç Beltran. 2024. “NOS-V: Co-Executing HPC Applications Using System-Wide Task Scheduling.” In IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, IPDPS 2024, San Francisco, CA, USA, May 27-31, 2024, 312–24. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/IPDPS57955.2024.00035.
@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/ipps/0006S024, author = {{\'{A}}lvarez, David and Sala, Kevin and Beltran, Vicen{\c{c}}}, title = {nOS-V: Co-Executing {HPC} Applications Using System-Wide Task Scheduling}, booktitle = {{IEEE} International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, {IPDPS} 2024, San Francisco, CA, USA, May 27-31, 2024}, pages = {312--324}, publisher = {{IEEE}}, year = {2024}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/IPDPS57955.2024.00035}, doi = {10.1109/IPDPS57955.2024.00035}, timestamp = {Wed, 17 Jul 2024 15:59:37 +0200}, biburl = {https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ipps/0006S024.bib}, bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org} } - Augonnet, Cédric, Samuel Thibault, Raymond Namyst, and Pierre-André Wacrenier. 2009. “StarPU: A Unified Platform for Task Scheduling on Heterogeneous Multicore Architectures.” In Euro-Par 2009 Parallel Processing, edited by Henk Sips, Dick Epema, and Hai-Xiang Lin, 863–74. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
@inproceedings{10.1007/978-3-642-03869-3_80, author = {Augonnet, C{\'e}dric and Thibault, Samuel and Namyst, Raymond and Wacrenier, Pierre-Andr{\'e}}, editor = {Sips, Henk and Epema, Dick and Lin, Hai-Xiang}, title = {StarPU: A Unified Platform for Task Scheduling on Heterogeneous Multicore Architectures}, booktitle = {Euro-Par 2009 Parallel Processing}, year = {2009}, publisher = {Springer Berlin Heidelberg}, address = {Berlin, Heidelberg}, pages = {863--874}, isbn = {978-3-642-03869-3} }In the field of HPC, the current hardware trend is to design multiprocessor architectures that feature heterogeneous technologies such as specialized coprocessors (e.g. Cell/BE SPUs) or data-parallel accelerators (e.g. GPGPUs). - Kale, L.V., M. Bhandarkar, N. Jagathesan, S. Krishnan, and J. Yelon. 1996. “Converse: an Interoperable Framework for Parallel Programming.” In Proceedings of International Conference on Parallel Processing, 212–17. https://doi.org/10.1109/IPPS.1996.508060.
@inproceedings{508060, author = {Kale, L.V. and Bhandarkar, M. and Jagathesan, N. and Krishnan, S. and Yelon, J.}, booktitle = {Proceedings of International Conference on Parallel Processing}, title = {Converse: an interoperable framework for parallel programming}, year = {1996}, volume = {}, number = {}, pages = {212-217}, keywords = {Parallel programming;Object oriented programming;Parallel languages;Runtime}, doi = {10.1109/IPPS.1996.508060} }