Nexus++: a Hardware Task Management System for Multicore Systems

Since the trend of improving processor’s performance has shifted toward in- tegrating more cores on the same chip, several parallel programming models have been proposed that aim at relieving parallel programming. Examples include Google’s MapReduce, Intel’s TBB, and OmpSs.

OmpSs is a promising approach, as it requires minimal effort of the pro- grammer to program in parallel since he or she can annotate the sequential application. The current software OmpSs runtime system, however, can be a bottleneck that limits the scalability of applications for large number of cores. Roughly speaking, the runtime system cannot compute task depen- dencies and attend to finished tasks fast enough to keep all cores busy. In this project we therefore develop Nexus++, a hardware system that provides architectural support for task-based parallel programming models such as OmpSs. The main goal of Nexus++ is to accelerate the task management responsibilities of the OmpSs runtime system.

To develop a hardware task management system that

• Accelerates task dependency resolution
• Improves the performance of application with fine-grained tasks
• Works for arbitrary task dependency graphs
• Requires no or minimal support from the programmer.
• Can be integrated in any type of multicore system.

• Tamer Dallou [2]
• Prof. Dr. Ben Juurlink [3]
• Dr. Cor Meenderinck [4]
• Nina Engelhardt [5]
• Ahmed Elhossini [6]

This research is funded by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme [FP7/2007-2013] under the ENCORE Project [7], grant agreement n◦ 248647. It is also funded by the German-Jordanian university [8].

MSc project Design of a hardware task management unit for multicore systems, Mauricio Fayula Gonzalez.