The OCR-Vx experience: lessons learned from designing and implementing a task-based runtime system

Abstract

Task-based runtime systems are an important branch of parallel programming research, since tasks decouple computation from the compute units, giving the runtime systems greater flexibility than a thread-based solution. This makes it easier to deal with the ever-increasing complexity of parallel architectures by providing a separation of concerns—the specification of parallelism is separated from the implementation of the parallel computations on a specific architecture. The Open Community Runtime is one such system, aimed at large-scale parallel systems. Unlike many other task-based runtime systems, the creators not only provided an implementation but there is also a comprehensive specification document. This has allowed us to create an independent implementation, called OCR-Vx. In this article, we present our experience of developing the runtime system, put our work in the context of the specification and the other implementations, and describe key lessons that we have learned during our work. We discuss the design and implementation issues of task-based runtime systems and applications including task synchronization and scheduling, data management, memory consistency, the relation between shared-memory and distributed-memory runtime systems, NUMA architectures, and heterogeneous systems. The article is aimed at audiences not familiar with OCR, since we believe these lessons could be valuable for developers working on other task-based runtime systems or designing new ones.

Mitigating the NUMA effect on task-based runtime systems

“…This solution focuses on iterative applications and might not be suitable for other kinds of applications. In a posterior work Dokulil and Benkner (2022), the same authors describe a model where applications can use hints to guide the scheduling of tasks. They still keep the option of the profiling analyzer that automatically generates hints for subsequent runs, but again showing promise only for iterative applications.…”