Revisiting conventional task schedulers to exploit asymmetry in multi-core architectures for dense linear algebra operations

Luis Costero, Francisco D. Igual, Katzalin Olcoz, Sandra Catalán, Rafael Rodríguez-Sánchez, Enrique S. Quintana-Ortí
2017 Parallel Computing  
Dealing with asymmetry in the architecture opens a plethora of questions from the perspective of scheduling task-parallel applications, and there exist early attempts to address this problem via ad-hoc strategies embedded into a runtime framework. In this paper we take a different path, which consists in addressing the complexity of the problem at the library level, via a few asymmetry-aware fundamental kernels, hiding the architecture heterogeneity from the task scheduler. For the specific
more » ... in of dense linear algebra, we show that this is not only possible but delivers much higher performance than a naive approach based on an asymmetry-oblivious scheduler. Furthermore, this solution also outperforms an ad-hoc asymmetry-aware scheduler furnished with sophisticated scheduling techniques.
doi:10.1016/j.parco.2017.06.002 fatcat:ncuqf3ts45a7nbpheisiie2yzy