Performance Evaluation of Task Pools Based on Hardware Synchronization

A task-based execution provides a universal approach to dynamic load balancing for irregular applications. Tasks are arbitrary units of work that are created dynamically at runtime and that are stored in a parallel data structure, the task pool, until they are scheduled onto a processor for execution. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of different task pool implementations for shared-memory computer systems using several realistic applications. We consider task pools with different data structures, different load balancing strategies and a specialized memory management. In particular, we use synchronization operations based on hardware support that is available on many modern microprocessors. We show that the resulting task pool implementations lead to a much better performance than implementations using Pthreads library calls for synchronization. The applications considered are parallel quicksort, volume rendering, ray tracing, and hierarchical radiosity. The target machi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: SC
• Authors: Ralf Hoffmann, Matthias Korch, Thomas Rauber
• Keywords: Applied Computing, Different Task Pool, SC 2004, Task Pool, Task Pool Implementations