On the Parallel Programmability of JavaSymphony for Multi-cores and Clusters

Abstract

This paper explains the programming aspects of a promising Java-based programming and execution framework called JavaSymphony. JavaSymphony provides unified high-level programming constructs for applications related to shared, distributed, hybrid memory parallel computers, and co-processors accelerators. JavaSymphony applications can be executed on multi-/many-core conventional and data-parallel architectures. JavaSymphony is based on the concept of dynamic virtual architectures, which allows programmers to define a hierarchical structure of the underlying computing resources and to control load-balancing and task-locality. In addition to GPU support, JavaSymphony provides a multi-core aware scheduling mechanism capable of mapping parallel applications on large multi-core machines and heterogeneous clusters. Several real applications and benchmarks (on modern multi-core computers, heterogeneous clusters, and machines consisting of a combination of different multi-core CPU and GPU devices) have been used to evaluate the performance. The results demonstrate that the JavaSymphony outperforms the Java implementations, as well as other modern alternative solutions.