Parallel Programming Model for the Epiphany Many-Core Coprocessor Using Threaded MPI

TL;DR

This paper introduces an MPI-based parallel programming model tailored for the Epiphany many-core architecture, enabling efficient execution of parallel algorithms with minimal code modifications and demonstrating high performance on key benchmarks.

Contribution

It presents the first MPI-based programming model for Epiphany, leveraging MPI to simplify parallel programming and improve performance on this architecture.

Findings

MPI implementation achieves high performance on benchmarks

Fast inter-core communication is crucial for efficiency

Minimal code modifications needed for MPI adaptation

Abstract

The Adapteva Epiphany many-core architecture comprises a 2D tiled mesh Network-on-Chip (NoC) of low-power RISC cores with minimal uncore functionality. It offers high computational energy efficiency for both integer and floating point calculations as well as parallel scalability. Yet despite the interesting architectural features, a compelling programming model has not been presented to date. This paper demonstrates an efficient parallel programming model for the Epiphany architecture based on the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. Using MPI exploits the similarities between the Epiphany architecture and a conventional parallel distributed cluster of serial cores. Our approach enables MPI codes to execute on the RISC array processor with little modification and achieve high performance. We report benchmark results for the threaded MPI implementation of four algorithms (dense matrix-matrix multiplication, N-body particle interaction, a five-point 2D stencil update, and 2D FFT) and highlight the importance of fast inter-core communication for the architecture.