Section: New Results

Automatic, Abstracted and Portable Topology-Aware Thread Placement

Efficiently programming shared-memory machines is a difficult challenge because mapping application threads onto the memory hierarchy has a strong impact on the performance. However, optimizing such thread placement is difficult: architectures become increasingly complex and application behavior changes with implementations and input parameters, e.g problem size and number of threads.We have worked on a fully automatic, abstracted and portable affinity module. It produces and implements an optimized affinity strategy that combines knowledge about application characteristics and the platform topology. Implemented in the back-end of our runtime system (ORWL), our approach was used to enhance the performance and the scalability of several unmodified ORWL-coded applications [23]