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Termination detection for fine-grained message-passing architectures

Termination detection for fine-grained message-passing architectures
Termination detection for fine-grained message-passing architectures

Barrier primitives provided by standard parallel programming APIs are the primary means by which applications implement global synchronisation. Typically these primitives are fully-committed to synchronisation in the sense that, once a barrier is entered, synchronisation is the only way out. For message-passing applications, this raises the question of what happens when a message arrives at a thread that already resides in a barrier. Without a satisfactory answer, barriers do not interact with message-passing in any useful way.In this paper, we propose a new refutable barrier primitive that combines with message-passing to form a simple, expressive, efficient, well-defined API. It has a clear semantics based on termination detection, and supports the development of both globally-synchronous and asynchronous parallel applications.To evaluate the new primitive, we implement it in a prototype large-scale message-passing machine with 49, 152 RISC-V threads distributed over 48 FPGAs. We show that hardware support for the primitive leads to a highly-efficient implementation, capable of synchronisation rates that are an order-of-magnitude higher than what is achievable in software. Using the primitive, we implement synchronous and asynchronous versions of a range of applications, observing that each version can have significant advantages over the other, depending on the application. Therefore, a barrier primitive supporting both styles can greatly assist the development of parallel programs.

1063-6862
17-24
IEEE
Naylor, Matthew
6c0f1008-4db4-4c09-8461-b2355bf25275
Moore, Simon W.
e9f2be21-1fa3-43aa-a3e2-fc8519f97a00
Mokhov, Andrey
7ad0909b-34e8-4f32-908c-b6406b397776
Thomas, David
5701997d-7de3-4e57-a802-ea2bd3e6ab6c
Beaumont, Jonathan R.
468f446e-2cff-4285-a490-44e634f468c0
Fleming, Shane
1a7f7be0-0c3f-4125-9298-5b5a6e0bc76e
Markettos, A. Theodore
76ebcf7c-05b3-4560-ba47-23eeb6f7787b
Bytheway, Thomas
95af7e4b-5daf-4fc4-b6e5-96a3b9f95b4c
Brown, Andrew
5c19e523-65ec-499b-9e7c-91522017d7e0
Hannig, Frank
Navaridas, Javier
Koch, Dirk
Abdelhadi, Ameer
Naylor, Matthew
6c0f1008-4db4-4c09-8461-b2355bf25275
Moore, Simon W.
e9f2be21-1fa3-43aa-a3e2-fc8519f97a00
Mokhov, Andrey
7ad0909b-34e8-4f32-908c-b6406b397776
Thomas, David
5701997d-7de3-4e57-a802-ea2bd3e6ab6c
Beaumont, Jonathan R.
468f446e-2cff-4285-a490-44e634f468c0
Fleming, Shane
1a7f7be0-0c3f-4125-9298-5b5a6e0bc76e
Markettos, A. Theodore
76ebcf7c-05b3-4560-ba47-23eeb6f7787b
Bytheway, Thomas
95af7e4b-5daf-4fc4-b6e5-96a3b9f95b4c
Brown, Andrew
5c19e523-65ec-499b-9e7c-91522017d7e0
Hannig, Frank
Navaridas, Javier
Koch, Dirk
Abdelhadi, Ameer

Naylor, Matthew, Moore, Simon W., Mokhov, Andrey, Thomas, David, Beaumont, Jonathan R., Fleming, Shane, Markettos, A. Theodore, Bytheway, Thomas and Brown, Andrew (2020) Termination detection for fine-grained message-passing architectures. Hannig, Frank, Navaridas, Javier, Koch, Dirk and Abdelhadi, Ameer (eds.) In 2020 IEEE 31st International Conference on Application-specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP). vol. 2020-July, IEEE. pp. 17-24 . (doi:10.1109/ASAP49362.2020.00012).

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

Barrier primitives provided by standard parallel programming APIs are the primary means by which applications implement global synchronisation. Typically these primitives are fully-committed to synchronisation in the sense that, once a barrier is entered, synchronisation is the only way out. For message-passing applications, this raises the question of what happens when a message arrives at a thread that already resides in a barrier. Without a satisfactory answer, barriers do not interact with message-passing in any useful way.In this paper, we propose a new refutable barrier primitive that combines with message-passing to form a simple, expressive, efficient, well-defined API. It has a clear semantics based on termination detection, and supports the development of both globally-synchronous and asynchronous parallel applications.To evaluate the new primitive, we implement it in a prototype large-scale message-passing machine with 49, 152 RISC-V threads distributed over 48 FPGAs. We show that hardware support for the primitive leads to a highly-efficient implementation, capable of synchronisation rates that are an order-of-magnitude higher than what is achievable in software. Using the primitive, we implement synchronous and asynchronous versions of a range of applications, observing that each version can have significant advantages over the other, depending on the application. Therefore, a barrier primitive supporting both styles can greatly assist the development of parallel programs.

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More information

e-pub ahead of print date: 31 July 2020
Additional Information: Funding Information: VIII. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to He Li and Mayhar Shahsavari. This work was supported by EPSRC grant EP/N031768/1 (POETS project). Publisher Copyright: © 2020 IEEE.
Venue - Dates: 31st IEEE International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures and Processors, ASAP 2020, , Manchester, United Kingdom, 2020-07-06 - 2020-07-08

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 470108
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/470108
ISSN: 1063-6862
PURE UUID: 34eb21ef-348d-4e29-8bc7-9ed315caa62b
ORCID for David Thomas: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-9671-0917

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Date deposited: 03 Oct 2022 16:52
Last modified: 11 May 2024 02:06

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Contributors

Author: Matthew Naylor
Author: Simon W. Moore
Author: Andrey Mokhov
Author: David Thomas ORCID iD
Author: Jonathan R. Beaumont
Author: Shane Fleming
Author: A. Theodore Markettos
Author: Thomas Bytheway
Author: Andrew Brown
Editor: Frank Hannig
Editor: Javier Navaridas
Editor: Dirk Koch
Editor: Ameer Abdelhadi

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