O2ATH: An OpenMP Offloading Toolkit for the Sunway Heterogeneous Manycore Platform

TL;DR

O2ATH is a toolkit that simplifies porting large legacy applications to Sunway supercomputers by enabling OpenMP offloading, achieving significant speedups with minimal code modifications.

Contribution

It introduces O2ATH, a novel toolkit that forwards OpenMP calls to Sunway's Athread library, easing the porting process for large applications.

Findings

Kernel speedups range from 3 to 15 times.

Whole application speedups range from 3 to 6 times.

O2ATH requires fewer code modifications than manual porting.

Abstract

The next generation Sunway supercomputer employs the SW26010pro processor, which features a specialized on-chip heterogeneous architecture. Applications with significant hotspots can benefit from the great computation capacity improvement of Sunway many-core architectures by carefully making intensive manual many-core parallelization efforts. However, some legacy projects with large codebases, such as CESM, ROMS and WRF, contain numerous lines of code and do not have significant hotspots. The cost of manually porting such applications to the Sunway architecture is almost unaffordable. To overcome such a challenge, we have developed a toolkit named O2ATH. O2ATH forwards GNU OpenMP runtime library calls to Sunway's Athread library, which greatly simplifies the parallelization work on the Sunway architecture.O2ATH enables users to write both MPE and CPE code in a single file, and parallelization can be achieved by utilizing OpenMP directives and attributes. In practice, O2ATH has helped us to port two large projects, CESM and ROMS, to the CPEs of the next generation Sunway supercomputers via the OpenMP offload method. In the experiments, kernel speedups range from 3 to 15 times, resulting in 3 to 6 times whole application speedups.Furthermore, O2ATH requires significantly fewer code modifications compared to manually crafting CPE functions.This indicates that O2ATH can greatly enhance development efficiency when porting or optimizing large software projects on Sunway supercomputers.