A library for portable and composable data locality optimizations for NUMA systems

Abstract

Many recent multiprocessor systems are realized with a non-uniform memory architecture (NUMA) and accesses to remote memory locations take more time than local memory accesses. Optimizing NUMA memory system performance is difficult and costly for three principal reasons: (1) today's programming languages/libraries have no explicit support for NUMA systems, (2) NUMA optimizations are not~portable, and (3) optimizations are not~composable (i.e., they can become ineffective or worsen performance in environments that support composable parallel software). This paper presents TBB-NUMA, a parallel programming library based on Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB) that supports portable and composable NUMA-aware programming. TBB-NUMA provides a model of task affinity that captures a programmer's insights on mapping tasks to resources. NUMA-awareness affects all layers of the library (i.e., resource management, task scheduling, and high-level parallel algorithm templates) and requires close coupling between all these layers. Optimizations implemented with TBB-NUMA (for a set of standard benchmark programs) result in up to 44% performance improvement over standard TBB, but more important, optimized programs are portable across different NUMA architectures and preserve data locality also when composed with other parallel computations.