Design and Implementation of a Criticality- and Heterogeneity-Aware Runtime System for Task-Parallel Applications

Abstract

Heterogeneous multiprocessing (HMP) is an emerging technology for high-performance and energy-efficient computing. While task parallelism is widely used in various computing domains, such as embedded, big-data, and machine-learning computing domains, it still remains unexplored to investigate the efficient runtime support that effectively utilizes the criticality of the tasks of the target application and the heterogeneity of the underlying HMP system with full resource management. To bridge this gap, we propose CHRT, a criticality- and heterogeneity-aware runtime system for task-parallel applications. CHRT dynamically estimates the performance and power consumption of the target task-parallel application and robustly manages the full HMP system resources (i.e., core types, counts, and voltage/frequency levels) to maximize the overall efficiency. Our quantitative evaluation based on widely-used task parallel benchmarks and two full HMP systems (i.e., the XU3 and HiKey970 HMP systems) demonstrates the effectiveness of CHRT in that CHRT achieves significantly higher energy (e.g., 60.4 and 57.2 percent on average on the XU3 system) and energy-delay product (e.g., 52.2 and 44.0 percent on average on the HiKey970 system) efficiency than the baseline runtime system that employs the breadth-first scheduler and the state-of-the-art criticality-aware runtime system and incurs low performance overheads.