Provably Efficient Scheduling of Cache-oblivious Wavefront Algorithms

Iterative wavefront algorithms for evaluating dynamic programming recurrences exploit optimal parallelism but show poor cache performance. Tiled-iterative wavefront algorithms achieve optimal cache complexity and high parallelism but are cache-aware and hence are not portable and not cache-adaptive. On the other hand, standard cache-oblivious recursive divide-and-conquer algorithms have optimal serial cache complexity but often have low parallelism due to artificial dependencies among subtasks. Recently, we introduced cache-oblivious recursive wavefront (COW) algorithms, which do not have any artificial dependencies, but they are too complicated to develop, analyze, implement, and generalize. Though COW algorithms are based on fork-join primitives, they extensively use atomic operations for ensuring correctness, and as a result, performance guarantees (i.e., parallel running time and parallel cache complexity) provided by state-of-the-art schedulers (e.g., the randomized work-stealing scheduler) for programs with fork-join primitives do not apply. Also, extensive use of atomic locks may result in high overhead in implementation.

In this paper, we show how to systematically transform standard cache-oblivious recursive divide-and-conquer algorithms into recursive wavefront algorithms to achieve optimal parallel cache complexity and high parallelism under state-of-the-art schedulers for fork-join programs. Unlike COW algorithms these new algorithms do not use atomic operations. Instead, they use closed-form formulas to compute the time when each divide-and-conquer function must be launched in order to achieve high parallelism without losing cache performance. The resulting implementations are arguably much simpler than implementations of known COW algorithms. We present theoretical analyses and experimental performance and scalability results showing a superiority of these new algorithms over existing algorithms.