G.: Toward high-throughput algorithms on many-core architectures

Advanced many-core CPU chips already have few hundreds of processing cores (e.g. 160 cores in an IBM Cyclops-64 chip) and more and more processing cores become available as computer architecture progresses. The underlying runtime systems of such architectures need to efficiently serve hundreds of processors at the same time, requiring all basic data structures within the runtime to maintain unprecedented throughput. In this paper, we analyze the throughput requirements that must be met by algorithms in runtime systems to be able to handle hundreds of simultaneous operations in real time. We reach a surprising conclusion: Many traditional algorithm techniques are poorly suited for highly parallel computing environments because of their low throughput. We reach the conclusion that the intrinsic throughput of a parallel program depends on both its algorithm and the processor architecture where the program runs. We provide theory to quantify the intrinsic throughput of algorithms, and we provide a few examples, where we describe the intrinsic throughput of existing, common algorithms. Then, we go on to explain how to follow a throughput-oriented approach to develop algorithms that have very high intrinsic throughput in many core architectures. We compare our throughput-oriented algorithms with other well known algorithms that provide the sam