HeteroPP: A directive‐based heterogeneous cooperative parallel programming framework

Abstract

AbstractHeterogeneous platforms composed of multiple different types of computing devices (such as CPUs, GPUs, and Intel MICs) have been widely used recently. However, most of parallel applications developed in such a heterogeneous platform usually only utilize a certain kind of computing device due to the lack of easy‐to‐use heterogeneous cooperative parallel programming models. To reduce the difficulty of heterogeneous cooperative parallel programming, a directive‐based heterogeneous cooperative parallel programming framework called HeteroPP is proposed. HeteroPP provides an easier way for programmers to fully exploit multiple different types of computing devices to concurrently and cooperatively perform data‐parallel applications on heterogeneous platforms. An extension to OpenMP directives and clauses is proposed to make it possible for programmers to easily offload a data‐parallel compute kernel to multiple different types of computing devices. A source‐to‐source compiler is designed to help programmers to automatically generate multiple device‐specific compute kernels that can be concurrently and cooperatively performed on heterogeneous platforms. Many experiments are conducted with 12 typical data‐parallel applications implemented with HeteroPP on a heterogeneous CPU‐GPU‐MIC platform. The results show that HeteroPP not only greatly simplifies the heterogeneous cooperative parallel programming, but also can fully utilize the CPUs, GPU, and MIC to efficiently perform these applications.