Declarative Data Flow in a Graph-Based Distributed Memory Runtime System

Abstract

Runtime systems can significantly reduce the cognitive complexity of scientific applications, narrowing the gap between systems engineering and domain science in HPC. One of the most important angles in this is automating data migration in a cluster. Traditional approaches require the application developer to model communication explicitly, for example through MPI primitives. Celerity, a runtime system for accelerator clusters heavily inspired by the SYCL programming model, instead provides a purely declarative approach focused around access patterns. In addition to eliminating the need for explicit data transfer operations, it provides a basis for efficient and dynamic scheduling at runtime. However, it is currently only suitable for accessing array-like data from runtime-controlled tasks, while real programs often need to interact with opaque data local to each host, such as handles or database connections, and also need a defined way of transporting data into and out of the virtualised buffers of the runtime. In this paper, we introduce a graph-based approach and declarative API for expressing side-effect dependencies between tasks and moving data from the runtime context to the application space.