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Improvement of workload balancing using parallel loop self-scheduling on Intel Xeon Phi

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Abstract

In recent years, Intel promotes its new product Xeon Phi coprocessor, which is similar to the x86 architecture coprocessor. It has about 60 cores and can be regarded as a single computing node, with the computing power that cannot be ignored. This work aims to improve the workload balance by parallel loop self-scheduling scheme performed on Xeon Phi-based computer cluster. The proposed concept is implemented by hybrid MPI and OpenMP parallel programming in C language. Since parallel loop self-scheduling composes of static and dynamic allocation, weighting algorithm is adopted in the static part, while the well-known loop self-scheduling is adopted in dynamic part. The loop block is partitioned according to the weighting of MIC and HOST nodes. Accordingly, Xeon Phi with many-core is adopted to implement parallel loop self-scheduling. Finally, we test the performance in the experiments by four applicable problems: matrix multiplication, sparse matrix multiplication, Mandelbrot set and circuit meet. The experimental results indicate how to do the weight allocation and which scheduling method can achieve the best performance.

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Acknowledgements

This work was sponsored by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan ROC, under Grants Numbers MOST 104-2221-E-029-010-MY3, MOST 105-2634-E-029-001 and MOST 105-2622-E-029-003-CC3.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Tunghai University, Taichung City, 40704, Taiwan, ROC

    Chao-Tung Yang, Chao-Wei Huang & Shuo-Tsung Chen

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  1. Chao-Tung Yang
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Correspondence to Chao-Tung Yang.

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Yang, CT., Huang, CW. & Chen, ST. Improvement of workload balancing using parallel loop self-scheduling on Intel Xeon Phi. J Supercomput 73, 4981–5005 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-017-2068-9

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