EAGER: PaRSEC: Parallel Runtime Scheduling and Execution Control

University Of Tennessee Knoxville, Knoxville TN

Investigators

Abstract

Trends in the design of high-performance computing systems are making them more difficult to use effectively. This EAGER award focuses on the problem of managing massive parallelism while effectively exploiting locality. Its goal is to develop breakthrough techniques for parallel runtime systems that will support libraries, applications, and other software infrastructure on the next generation of high-performance systems. The PI proposes to develop the Parallel Runtime Scheduling and Execution Control system (PaRSEC), which will serve as a prototype for novel ideas about parallel runtime systems. The PI's approach will be based on scalable directed acyclic graph (DAG) scheduling techniques that will track data dependencies between tasks. The scheduling structures will be designed to handle billions of tasks running on millions of computational nodes. The scheduling framework will also have to handle task migration and load balancing to maximize parallelism while preserving data locality. The prototypes developed as part of this EAGER will provide the foundation for future research on parallel linear algebra routines for extreme-scale computing systems.