HeSP: a simulation framework for solving the task scheduling-partitioning problem on heterogeneous architectures

TL;DR

HeSP is a simulation framework that enables dynamic task partitioning and scheduling decisions on heterogeneous architectures, leading to significant performance improvements in dense linear algebra algorithms.

Contribution

The paper introduces HeSP, a novel simulation framework that jointly models recursive task partitioning and scheduling for heterogeneous systems, enhancing performance analysis.

Findings

Dynamic partitioning and scheduling improve performance.

Significant gains on CPU-GPU and ARM big.LITTLE platforms.

Framework can inform real runtime schedulers.

Abstract

In this paper we describe HeSP, a complete simulation framework to study a general task scheduling-partitioning problem on heterogeneous architectures, which treats recursive task partitioning and scheduling decisions on equal footing. Considering recursive partitioning as an additional degree of freedom, tasks can be dynamically partitioned or merged at runtime for each available processor type, exposing additional or reduced degrees of parallelism as needed. Our simulations reveal that, for a specific class of dense linear algebra algorithms taken as a driving example, simultaneous decisions on task scheduling and partitioning yield significant performance gains on two different heterogeneous platforms: a highly heterogeneous CPU-GPU system and a low-power asymmetric big.LITTLE ARM platform. The insights extracted from the framework can be further applied to actual runtime task schedulers in order to improve performance on current or future architectures and for different task-parallel codes.