OmpSs-OpenCL Programming Model for Heterogeneous Systems

Abstract

The advent of heterogeneous computing has forced programmers to use platform specific programming paradigms in order to achieve maximum performance. This approach has a steep learning curve for programmers and also has detrimental influence on productivity and code re-usability. To help with this situation, OpenCL an open-source, parallel computing API for cross platform computations was conceived. OpenCL provides a homogeneous view of the computational resources (CPU and GPU) thereby enabling software portability across different platforms. Although OpenCL resolves software portability issues, the programming paradigm presents low programmability and additionally falls short in performance. In this paper we focus on integrating OpenCL framework with the OmpSs task based programming model using Nanos run time infrastructure to address these shortcomings. This would enable the programmer to skip cumbersome OpenCL constructs including OpenCL plaform creation, compilation, kernel building, kernel argument setting and memory transfers, instead write a sequential program with annotated pragmas. Our proposal mainly focuses on how to exploit the best of the underlying hardware platform with greater ease in programming and to gain significant performance using the data parallelism offered by the OpenCL run time for GPUs and multicore architectures. We have evaluated the platform with important benchmarks and have noticed substantial ease in programming with comparable performance.