OpenMP extension to SMP clusters

Yang-Suk Kee
2006 IEEE potentials  
Easy-to-use programming paradigm for high performance computing has been a challenging issue in the parallel computing community. This paper discusses on the approaches to apply the OpenMP programming model to SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processor) clusters using SDSM (Software Distributed Shared Memory). Especially, the major focus of this paper is on the challenges that the prior studies faced and on their solution techniques. The major obstacles are thread-unsafe memory access, slow inter-process
more » ... nchronization, and excessive remote page accesses, which stem from the page-based memory consistency mechanisms of the traditional SDSM systems. Exploiting message passing primitives explicitly for the OpenMP synchronization and work-sharing directives enables light inter-process synchronizations while the techniques such as variable privatization to reduce the shared address space and selective data touch and migratory home to exploit data locality avoid unnecessary page migrations significantly. Through the evaluation of an OpenMP micro-benchmark program and a real application, an exemplary system, ParADE that leverages these techniques achieved scalable performance on small-scale SMP clusters.
doi:10.1109/mp.2006.1657761 fatcat:5th5gj37wzbqbd5febzq7hoavq