Comparison of Three Popular Parallel Programming Models on the Intel Xeon Phi

Abstract

Systems with large numbers of cores have become commonplace. Accordingly, applications are shifting towards increased parallelism. In a general-purpose system, applications residing in the system compete for shared resources. Thread and task scheduling in such a multithreaded multiprogramming environment is a significant challenge. In this study, we have chosen the Intel Xeon Phi system as a modern platform to explore how popular parallel programming models, namely OpenMP, Intel Cilk Plus and Intel TBB (Threading Building Blocks) scale on manycore architectures. We have used three benchmarks with different features which exercise different aspects of the system performance. Moreover, a multiprogramming scenario is used to compare the behaviours of these models when all three applications reside in the system. Our initial results show that it is to some extent possible to infer multiprogramming performance from single-program cases.