PySchedCL: Leveraging Concurrency in Heterogeneous Data-Parallel Systems

Abstract

In the past decade, high performance compute capabilities exhibited by heterogeneous GPGPU platforms have led to the popularity of data parallel programming languages such as CUDA and OpenCL. Developing high performance parallel programming solutions using such languages involve a steep learning curve due to the complexity of the underlying heterogeneous compute devices and their impact on performance. This has led to the emergence of several High Performance Computing frameworks which provide high-level abstractions for easing the development of data-parallel applications on heterogeneous platforms. However, the scheduling decisions undertaken by such frameworks only exploit coarse-grained concurrency in data parallel applications. In this paper, we propose PySchedCL, a framework which explores fine-grained concurrency aware scheduling decisions that harness the power of heterogeneous CPU/GPU architectures efficiently. We showcase the efficacy of such scheduling mechanisms over existing coarse-grained dynamic scheduling schemes by conducting extensive experimental evaluations for a diverse set of popular Deep Learning benchmarks.