Programming Heterogeneous Clusters with Accelerators Using Object-Based Programming

Abstract

Heterogeneous clusters that include accelerators have become more common in the realm of high performance computing because of the high GFlop/s rates such clusters are capable of achieving. However, heterogeneous clusters are typically considered hard to program as they usually require programmers to interleave architecture-specific code within application code. We have extended the Charm++ programming model and runtime system to support heterogeneous clusters (with host cores that differ in their architecture) that include accelerators. We are currently focusing on clusters that include commodity processors, Cell processors, and Larrabee devices. When our extensions are used to develop code, the resulting code is portable between various homogeneous and heterogeneous clusters that may or may not include accelerators. Using a simple example molecular dynamics (MD) code, we demonstrate our programming model extensions and runtime system modifications on a heterogeneous cluster comprised of Xeon and Cell processors. Even though there is no architecture-specific code in the example MD program, it is able to successfully make use of three core types, each with a different ISA (Xeon, PPE, SPE), three SIMD instruction extensions (SSE, AltiVec/VMX and the SPE's SIMD instructions), and two memory models (cache hierarchies and scratchpad memories) in a single execution. Our programming model extensions abstract away hardware complexities while our runtime system modifications automatically adjust application data to account for architectural differences between the various cores.