Runtime Techniques for Automatic Process Virtualization

Abstract

Asynchronous many-task runtimes look promising for the next generation of high performance computing systems. But these runtimes are usually based on new programming models, requiring extensive programmer effort to port existing applications to them. An alternative approach is to reimagine the execution model of widely used programming APIs, such as MPI, in order to execute them more asynchronously. Virtualization is a powerful technique that can be used to execute a bulk synchronous parallel program in an asynchronous manner. Moreover, if the virtualized entities can be migrated between address spaces, the runtime can optimize execution with dynamic load balancing, fault tolerance, and other adaptive techniques. Previous work on automating process virtualization has explored compiler approaches, source-to-source refactoring tools, and runtime methods. These approaches achieve virtualization with different tradeoffs in terms of portability (across different architectures, operating systems, compilers, and linkers), programmer effort required, and the ability to handle all different kinds of global state and programming languages. We implement support for three different related runtime methods, discuss shortcomings and their applicability to user-level virtualized process migration, and compare performance to existing approaches. Compared to existing approaches, one of our new methods achieves what we consider the best overall functionality in terms of portability, automation, support for migration, and runtime performance.