On the maturity of parallel applications for asymmetric multi-core processors

Asymmetric multi-cores (AMCs) are a successful architectural solution for both mobile devices and supercomputers. By maintaining two types of cores (fast and slow) AMCs are able to provide high performance under the facility power budget. This paper performs the first extensive evaluation of how por...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Chronaki, Kallia, Moretó Planas, Miquel|||0000-0002-9848-8758, Casas, Marc|||0000-0003-4564-2093, Rico, Alejandro, Badia Sala, Rosa Maria|||0000-0003-2941-5499, Ayguadé Parra, Eduard|||0000-0002-5146-103X, Valero Cortés, Mateo|||0000-0003-2917-2482
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2019
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/133416
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/133416
https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpdc.2019.01.007
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Supercomputers
High performance computing
Parallel programming (Computer science)
Scheduling
Runtime systems
Asymmetric multi-cores
HPC
Superordinadors
Càlcul intensiu (Informàtica)
Programació en paral·lel (Informàtica)
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Arquitectura de computadors
Descripción
Sumario:Asymmetric multi-cores (AMCs) are a successful architectural solution for both mobile devices and supercomputers. By maintaining two types of cores (fast and slow) AMCs are able to provide high performance under the facility power budget. This paper performs the first extensive evaluation of how portable are the current HPC applications for such supercomputing systems. Specifically we evaluate several execution models on an ARM big.LITTLE AMC using the PARSEC benchmark suite that includes representative highly parallel applications. We compare schedulers at the user, OS and runtime levels, using both static and dynamic options and multiple configurations, and assess the impact of these options on the well-known problem of balancing the load across AMCs. Our results demonstrate that scheduling is more effective when it takes place in the runtime system level as it improves the baseline by 23%, while the heterogeneous-aware OS scheduling solution improves the baseline by 10%.