Wool: low overhead work stealing for fine grain parallelism.

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• Karl-Filip Faxén (SICS)
• Friday 21 October 2011, 14:00-15:00
• SS03, Computer Laboratory.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dominic Orchard.

Note unusual time of 2pm.

This talk deals with improving the performance of fine grain task parallelism. It is often either cumbersome or impossible to increase the grain size of such programs. Increasing core counts exacerbates the problem; a program that appears coarse-grained on eight cores may well look a lot more fine-grained on sixty four.

We present Wool, a library that schedules tasks using work stealing. In this paradigm, idle processors steal work (tasks) from randomly selected non idle processors. In many cases, especially when tasks are fine grained, most tasks are never stolen. Such tasks incur only a minimal overhead (from a few to a few tens of cycles), while stealing costs hundreds to a couple of thousand cycles.

We discuss the design and implementation of Wool, with an emphasis of the features allowing low overhead implementation.

This talk is part of the Computer Laboratory Programming Research Group Seminar series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Cambridge talks
• Computer Laboratory Programming Research Group Seminar
• Department of Computer Science and Technology talks and seminars
• Interested Talks
• SS03, Computer Laboratory
• School of Technology
• Trust & Technology Initiative - interesting events
• bld31

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