Scheduling for heterogeneous systems in accelerator-rich environments

Abstract

The world is creating ever more data and the applications are required to deal with ever-increasing datasets. To process such datasets heterogeneous and manycore accelerators are being deployed in various computing systems to improve energy efficiency. In this work, we present a runtime management system designed for such heterogeneous systems with manycore accelerators. More specifically, we design a resource-based runtime management system that considers application characteristics and respective execution properties on the nodes and accelerators. We propose scheduling heuristics and run time environment solutions to achieve better throughput and reduced energy in computing systems with different accelerators. We give implementation details about our framework; show different scheduling algorithms, and present experimental evaluation of our system. We also compare our approaches with an optimal scheme where integer linear programming approach has been implemented for mapping applications on the heterogeneous system. While it is possible to extend the proposed framework to a wide variety of accelerators, our initial focus is on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Our experimental evaluations show that including accelerator support in the management framework improves energy consumption and execution time significantly. We believe that this approach has the potential to provide an effective solution for next generation accelerator-based computing systems.