Work-First and Help-First Scheduling Policies for Terminally Strict Parallel Programs

Multiple programming models are emerging to address an increased need for dynamic task parallelism in applications for multicore processors and shared-address space parallel computing. Examples include OpenMP 3.0, Java Concurrency Utilities, Microsoft Task Parallel Library, Intel Thread Building Blocks, Cilk, X10, Chapel, and Fortress. Scheduling algorithms based on work stealing, as embodied in Cilk’s implementation of dynamic spawn-sync parallelism, are gaining in popularity but also have inherent limitations. In this paper, we address the problem of efficient and scalable implementation of X10’s terminally strict async-finish task parallelism, which is more general than Cilk’s fully strict spawn-sync parallelism. We introduce a new work-stealing scheduler with compiler support for async-finish task parallelism that can accommodate both work-first and help-first scheduling policies. Performance results on two different multicore SMP platforms show significant improvements due to our new work-stealing algorithm compared to the existing work-sharing scheduler for X10, and also provide insight on scenarios in which the help-first policy yields better results than the work-first policy and vice versa