Argobots: A Lightweight Low-Level Threading and Tasking Framework

TitleArgobots: A Lightweight Low-Level Threading and Tasking Framework
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2017
AuthorsSeo, S., A. Amer, P. Balaji, C. Bordage, G. Bosilca, A. Brooks, P. Carns, A. Castello, D. Genet, T. Herault, S. Iwasaki, P. Jindal, S. Kale, S. Krishnamoorthy, J. Lifflander, H. Lu, E. Meneses, M. Snir, Y. Sun, K. Taura, and P. Beckman
JournalIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
Date Published2017-10
KeywordsArgobots, context switch, I/O, interoperability, lightweight, MPI, OpenMP, stackable scheduler, tasklet, user-level thread
Abstract

In the past few decades, a number of user-level threading and tasking models have been proposed in the literature to address the shortcomings of OS-level threads, primarily with respect to cost and flexibility. Current state-of-the-art user-level threading and tasking models, however, are either too specific to applications or architectures or are not as powerful or flexible. In this paper, we present Argobots, a lightweight, low-level threading and tasking framework that is designed as a portable and performant substrate for high-level programming models or runtime systems. Argobots offers a carefully designed execution model that balances generality of functionality with providing a rich set of controls to allow specialization by the user or high-level programming model. We describe the design, implementation, and optimization of Argobots and present integrations with three example high-level models: OpenMP, MPI, and co-located I/O service. Evaluations show that (1) Argobots outperforms existing generic threading runtimes; (2) our OpenMP runtime offers more efficient interoperability capabilities than production OpenMP runtimes do; (3) when MPI interoperates with Argobots instead of Pthreads, it enjoys reduced synchronization costs and better latency hiding capabilities; and (4) I/O service with Argobots reduces interference with co-located applications, achieving performance competitive with that of the Pthreads version.

URLhttp://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8082139/
DOI10.1109/TPDS.2017.2766062
Project Tags: 
External Publication Flag: