Calico: Disciplined Work-Stealing for Varying Core-Counts

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Ross McIlroy (MSR) and Steven Smith (University of Cambridge)
• Thursday 19 May 2011, 16:00-17:00
• FW26, Computer Laboratory, William Gates Builiding.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact eiko.yoneki.

As multi-core architectures become more pervasive, applications running on commodity systems are being forced to turn to parallelism if they are to increase their performance. These consumer applications must compete with other programs running on the system for access to processing cores, unlike traditional parallel applications running on HPC systems, which typically the only application running on the machine. Therefore, the number of processing cores available to these applications varies from moment to moment. The process of parallelising an application to efficiently exploit a varying number of core-counts is further complicated by architectures which can dynamically varying the number of physically active cores, either for energy efficiency, or due to dynamically reconfiguration in architectures such as TRIPS or E2, which can dynamically re-compose multiple physical cores into a single, more powerful logical core.

In this talk, we will discuss our initial work on a runtime system called Calico. Calico is runtime system designed to provide the flexibility of dynamic work-stealing approaches, such as Cilk, while still providing the efficiency of a more static approach to parallelism, such as that provided by OpenMP. It does this by providing a programming model which enables the application to specify how to efficiently partition work between multiple threads, whilst hiding the work-stealing mechanism within the Calico runtime system. This enables the Calico runtime system to decide when more parallel work should be spawned by, for example, repartitioning the available work as more cores become available.

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

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• CL's SRG seminar
• Cambridge Centre for Data-Driven Discovery (C2D3)
• Cambridge talks
• Chris Davis' list
• Computer Laboratory Systems Research Group Seminar
• Department of Computer Science and Technology talks and seminars
• FW26, Computer Laboratory, William Gates Builiding
• Interested Talks
• School of Technology
• Trust & Technology Initiative - interesting events
• bld31
• ndk22's list
• ob366-ai4er
• rp587

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.