The cooperative parallel: A discussion about run-time schedulers for nested parallelism

Abstract

Nested parallelism is a well-known parallelization strategy to exploit irregular parallelism in HPC applications. This strategy also fits in critical real-time embedded systems, composed of a set of concurrent functionalities. In this case, nested parallelism can be used to further exploit the parallelism of each functionality. However, current run-time implementations of nested parallelism can produce inefficiencies and load imbalance. Moreover, in critical real-time embedded systems, it may lead to incorrect executions due to, for instance, a work non-conserving scheduler. In both cases, the reason is that the teams of OpenMP threads are a black-box for the scheduler, i.e., the scheduler that assigns OpenMP threads and tasks to the set of available computing resources is agnostic to the internal execution of each team.

This paper proposes a new run-time scheduler that considers dynamic information of the OpenMP threads and tasks running within several concurrent teams, i.e., concurrent parallel regions. This information may include the existence of OpenMP threads waiting in a barrier and the priority of tasks ready to execute. By making the concurrent parallel regions to cooperate, the shared computing resources can be better controlled and a work conserving and priority driven scheduler can be guaranteed.