An execution environment for flexible task-oriented software on multicore systems

Abstract

The article addresses the challenges of software development for current and future parallel computers, which are expected to be dominated by multicore and many-core architectures. Using these multicore processors for cluster systems will create systems with thousands of cores and deep memory hierarchies. To efficiently exploit the tremendous parallelism of these hardware platforms, a new generation of programming methodologies is needed. This article proposes a parallel programming methodology exploiting a task-based representation of application software. For the specification of task-based programs, a coordination language is presented, which uses external variables to express the cooperation between tasks. For the actual execution of a task-based program on a specific parallel architecture, different dynamic scheduling algorithms embedded into an execution environment are introduced. Runtime experiments for complex methods from a numerical analysis are performed on different parallel execution platforms.