Compiler Support for Work-Stealing Parallel Runtime Systems

Multiple programming models are emerging to address an increased need for dynamic task parallelism in multicore shared-memory multiprocessors. Examples include OpenMP 3.0, Java Concurrency Utilities, Microsoft Task Parallel Library, Intel Threading 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 focus on the compiler support needed to extend work-stealing for dynamic async-finish task parallelism as supported by X10 and Habanero-Java (HJ). We discuss the compiler support needed for workstealing with both the work-first and help-first policies. Performance results obtained using our compiler and the HJ work-stealing runtime show significant improvement compared to the earlier work-sharing runtime from X10 v1.5. We also propose and implement three optimizations, Dynamic-Loop-Chunking, Redundant-Frame-Store, and Objects-As-Frames, that can be performed in the compiler to improve the code generated for work-stealing schedulers. Performance results show that the Dynamic-Loop-Chunking optimization significantly improves the performance of loop based benchmarks using work-stealing schedulers with work-first policy. The Redundant-Frame-Store optimizations provide a significant reduction in the code size. The results also show that our novel Objects-As-Frames optimization yields performance improvement in many cases. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first implementation of compiler support for work-stealing schedulers for async-finish parallelism with both the work-first and help-first policies and support for task migration