Autonomic management experiences in structured parallel programming

Abstract

Structured parallel programming models based on parallel design patterns are gaining more and more importance. Several state-of-the-art industrial frameworks build on the parallel design pattern concept, including Intel TBB and Microsoft PPL. In these frameworks, the explicit exposition of parallel structure of the application favours the identification of the inefficiencies, the exploitation of techniques increasing the efficiency of the implementation and ensures that most of the more critical aspects related to an efficient exploitation of the available parallelism are moved from application programmers to framework designers. The very same exposition of the graph representing the parallel activities enables framework designers to emplace efficient autonomic management of non functional concerns, such as performance tuning or power management. In this paper, we discuss how autonomic management features evolved in different structured parallel programming frameworks based on the algorithmic skeletons and parallel design patterns. We show that different levels of autonomic management are possible, ranging from simple provisioning of mechanisms suitable to support programmers in the implementation of ad hoc autonomic managers to the complete autonomic managers whose behaviour may be programmed using high level rules by the application programmers.