Reducing overhead in the Uintah framework to support short-lived tasks on GPU-heterogeneous architectures

Abstract

The Uintah computational framework is used for the parallel solution of partial differential equations on adaptive mesh refinement grids using modern supercomputers. Uintah is structured with an application layer and a separate runtime system. The Uintah runtime system is based on a distributed directed acyclic graph (DAG) of computational tasks, with a task scheduler that efficiently schedules and execute these tasks on both CPU cores and on-node accelerators. The runtime system identifies task dependencies, creates a taskgraph prior to an iteration based on these dependencies, prepares data for tasks, automatically generates MPI message tags, and manages data after task computation. Managing tasks for accelerators pose significant challenges over their CPU task counterparts due to supporting more memory regions, API call latency, memory bandwidth concerns, and the added complexity of development. These challenges are greatest when tasks compute within a few milliseconds, especially those that have stencil based computations that involve halo data, have little reuse of data, and/or require many computational variables. Current and emerging heterogeneous architectures necessitate addressing these challenges within Uintah. This work is not designed to improve performance of existing tasks, but rather reduce runtime overhead to allow developers writing short-lived computational tasks to utilize Uintah in a heterogeneous environment. This work analyzes an initial approach for managing accelerator tasks alongside existing CPU tasks within Uintah. The principal contribution of this work is to identify and address inefficiencies that arise when mapping tasks onto the GPU, to implement new schemes to reduce runtime system overhead, to introduce new features that allow for more tasks to leverage on-node accelerators, and to show overhead reduction results from these improvements.