StarPU: A Unified Platform for Task Scheduling on Heterogeneous Multicore Architectures

Abstract. 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). Approaching the theoretical performance of these architectures is a complex issue. Indeed, substantial efforts have already been devoted to efficiently offload parts of the computations. However, designing an execution model that unifies all computing units and associated embedded memory remains a main challenge. We have thus designed STARPU, an original runtime system providing a highlevel, unified execution model tightly coupled with an expressive data management library. The main goal of STARPU is to provide numerical kernel designers with a convenient way to generate parallel tasks over heterogeneous hardware on the one hand, and easily develop and tune powerful scheduling algorithms on the other hand. We have developed several strategies that ca...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: EUROPAR
• Authors: Cédric Augonnet, Samuel Thibault, Raymond Namyst, Pierre-André Wacrenier
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, EUROPAR 2009, Execution Model, Heterogeneous Technologies, Unified Execution Model