A library for portable and composable data locality optimizations for NUMA systems

Many recent multiprocessor systems are realized with a nonuniform memory architecture (NUMA) and accesses to remote memory locations take more time than local memory accesses. Optimizing NUMA memory system performance is difficult and costly for three principal reasons: (1) today’s programming languages/libraries have no explicit support for NUMA systems, (2) NUMA optimizations are not portable, and (3) optimizations are not composable (i.e., they can become ineffective or worsen performance in environments that support composable parallel software). This paper presents TBB-NUMA, a parallel programming library based on Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB) that supports portable and composable NUMA-aware programming. TBBNUMA provides a model of task affinity that captures a programmer’s insights on mapping tasks to resources. NUMA-awareness affects all layers of the library (i.e., resource management, task scheduling, and high-level parallel algorithm templates) and requires clo...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: PPOPP
• Authors: Zoltan Majo, Thomas R. Gross
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, PPOPP 2015