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The performance impact of granularity control and functional parallelism

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Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing (LCPC 1995)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1033))

Abstract

Task granularity and functional parallelism are fundamental issues in the optimization of parallel programs. Appropriate granularity for exploitation of parallelism is affected by characteristics of both the program and the execution environment. In this paper we demonstrate the efficacy of dynamic granularity control. The scheme we propose uses dynamic runtime information to select the task size of exploited parallelism at various stages of the execution of a program. We also demonstrate that functional parallelism can be an important factor in improving the performance of parallel programs, both in the presence and absence of loop-level parallelism. Functional parallelism can increase the amount of large-grain parallelism as well as provide finer-grain parallelism that leads to better load balance. Analytical models and benchmark results quantify the impact of granularity control and functional parallelism. The underlying implementation for this research is a low-overhead threads model based on user-level scheduling.

This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research under grant N00014-94-1-0234. Computational facilities were provided by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. José Moreira was at the University of Illinois during the development of this research.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, 10598-0218, Yorktown Heights, NY

    José E. Moreira

  2. Center for Supercomputing Research and Development, Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1308 W. Main St., 61801-2307, Urbana, IL

    Dale Schouten & Constantine Polychronopoulos

Authors
  1. José E. Moreira
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  2. Dale Schouten
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  3. Constantine Polychronopoulos
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Editor information

Chua-Huang Huang Ponnuswamy Sadayappan Utpal Banerjee David Gelernter Alex Nicolau David Padua

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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Moreira, J.E., Schouten, D., Polychronopoulos, C. (1996). The performance impact of granularity control and functional parallelism. In: Huang, CH., Sadayappan, P., Banerjee, U., Gelernter, D., Nicolau, A., Padua, D. (eds) Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing. LCPC 1995. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1033. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0014225

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0014225

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-60765-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49446-1

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