Improving Application Performance by Efficiently Utilizing Heterogeneous Many-core Platforms

Abstract

Heterogeneous platforms integrating different types of processing units (such as multi-core CPUs and GPUs) are in high demand in high performance computing. Existing studies have shown that using heterogeneous platforms can improve application performance and hardware utilization. However, systematic methods to design, implement, and map applications to efficiently use heterogeneous computing resources are only very few. The goal of my PhD research is therefore to study such heterogeneous systems and propose systematic methods to allow many (classes of) applications to efficiently use them. After 3.5 years of PhD study, my contributions are (1) a thorough evaluation of a suitable programming model for heterogeneous computing, (2) a workload partitioning framework to accelerate parallel applications on heterogeneous platforms, (3) a modelling-based prediction method to determine the optimal workload partitioning, (4) a systematic approach to decide the best mapping between the application and the platform by choosing the best performing hardware configuration (Only-CPU, Only-GPU, or CPU+GPU with the workload partitioning). In the near future, I plan to apply my approach to large-scale applications and platforms to expand its usability and applicability.