Transaction Level Analysis for a Clustered and Hardware-Enhanced Task Manager on Homogeneous Many-Core Systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a clustered, hardware-enhanced task management system for homogeneous many-core architectures, reducing management overhead through dedicated hardware nodes and workload communication.

Contribution

It introduces a novel clustered infrastructure with dedicated hardware nodes for run-time task management, improving efficiency over traditional centralized or distributed systems.

Findings

Reduced management overhead compared to centralized systems

Improved application speedup with the proposed architecture

Effective workload status communication mechanism

Abstract

The increasing parallelism of many-core systems demands for efficient strategies for the run-time system management. Due to the large number of cores the management overhead has a rising impact to the overall system performance. This work analyzes a clustered infrastructure of dedicated hardware nodes to manage a homogeneous many-core system. The hardware nodes implement a message passing protocol and perform the task mapping and synchronization at run-time. To make meaningful mapping decisions, the global management nodes employ a workload status communication mechanism. This paper discusses the design-space of the dedicated infrastructure by means of task mapping use-cases and a parallel benchmark including application-interference. We evaluate the architecture in terms of application speedup and analyze the mechanism for the status communication. A comparison versus centralized and fully-distributed configurations demonstrates the reduction of the computation and communication management overhead for our approach.