Scheduling Chapel Tasks with Qthreads on Manycore: A Tale of Two Schedulers

Abstract

This paper describes improvements in task scheduling for the Chapel parallel programming language provided in its default on-node tasking runtime, the Qthreads library. We describe a new scheduler distrib which builds on the approaches of two previous Qthreads schedulers, Sherwood and Nemesis, and combines the best aspects of both --work stealing and load balancing from Sherwood and a lock free queue access from Nemesis-- to make task queuing better suited for the use of Chapel in the manycore era. We demonstrate the efficacy of this new scheduler by showing improvements in various individual benchmarks of the Chapel test suite on the Intel Knights Landing architecture.