Dynamic task discovery in PaRSEC: a data-flow task-based runtime

Abstract

Successfully exploiting distributed collections of heterogeneous many-cores architectures with complex memory hierarchy through a portable programming model is a challenge for application developers. The literature is not short of proposals addressing this problem, including many evolutionary solutions that seek to extend the capabilities of current message passing paradigms with intra-node features (MPI+X). A different, more revolutionary, solution explores data-flow task-based runtime systems as a substitute to both local and distributed data dependencies management. The solution explored in this paper, PaRSEC, is based on such a programming paradigm, supported by a highly efficient task-based runtime. This paper compares two programming paradigms present in PaRSEC, Parameterized Task Graph (PTG) and Dynamic Task Discovery (DTD) in terms of capabilities, overhead and potential benefits.