Automated prioritizing heuristics for parallel task graph scheduling in heterogeneous computing

Abstract

High-performance computing (HPC) relies increasingly on heterogeneous hardware and especially on the combination of central and graphical processing units. The task-based method has demonstrated promising potential for parallelizing applications on such computing nodes. With this approach, the scheduling strategy becomes a critical layer that describes where and when the ready-tasks should be executed among the processing units. In this study, we describe a heuristic-based approach that assigns priorities to each task type. We rely on a fitness score for each task/worker combination for generating priorities and use these for configuring the Heteroprio scheduler automatically within the StarPU runtime system. We evaluate our method’s theoretical performance on emulated executions and its real-case performance on multiple different HPC applications. We show that our approach is usually equivalent or faster than expert-defined priorities.