Bandwidth and Locality Aware Task-stealing for Manycore Architectures with Bandwidth-Asymmetric Memory

Abstract

Parallel computers now start to adopt Bandwidth-Asymmetric Memory architecture that consists of traditional DRAM memory and new High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) for high memory bandwidth. However, existing task schedulers suffer from low bandwidth usage and poor data locality problems in bandwidth-asymmetric memory architectures. To solve the two problems, we propose a Bandwidth and Locality Aware Task-stealing (BATS) system, which consists of an HBM-aware data allocator, a bandwidth-aware traffic balancer, and a hierarchical task-stealing scheduler. Leveraging compile-time code transformation and run-time data distribution, the data allocator enables HBM usage automatically without user interference. According to data access hotness, the traffic balancer migrates data to balance memory traffic across memory nodes proportional to their bandwidth. The hierarchical scheduler improves data locality at runtime without a priori program knowledge. Experiments on an Intel Knights Landing server that adopts bandwidth-asymmetric memory show that BATS reduces the execution time of memory-bound programs up to 83.5% compared with traditional task-stealing schedulers.