A scheduling framework for general-purpose parallel languages

The trend in microprocessor design toward multicore and manycore processors means that future performance gains in software will largely come from harnessing parallelism. To realize such gains, we need languages and implementations that can enable parallelism at many different levels. For example, an application might use both explicit threads to implement course-grain parallelism for independent tasks and implicit threads for fine-grain data-parallel computation over a large array. An important aspect of this requirement is supporting a wide range of different scheduling mechanisms for parallel computation. In this paper, we describe the scheduling framework that we have designed and implemented for Manticore, a strict parallel functional language. We take a micro-kernel approach in our design: the compiler and runtime support a small collection of scheduling primitives upon which complex scheduling policies can be implemented. This framework is extremely flexible and can support a w...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICFP
• Authors: Matthew Fluet, Mike Rainey, John H. Reppy
• Keywords: Complex Scheduling Policies, Heterogeneous Parallel Languages, ICFP 2008, Multiple Scheduling Policies, Programming Languages