POSTER: Provably Efficient Scheduling of Cache-Oblivious Wavefront Algorithms

Abstract

Standard cache-oblivious recursive divide-and-conquer algorithms for evaluating dynamic programming recurrences have optimal serial cache complexity but often have lower parallelism compared with iterative wavefront algorithms due to artificial dependencies among subtasks. Very recently cache-oblivious recursive wavefront (COW) algorithms have been introduced which do not have any artificial dependencies. Though COW algorithms are based on fork-join primitives, they extensively use atomic operations, and as a result, performance guarantees provided by state-of-the-art schedulers for programs with fork-join primitives do not apply. In this work, we show how to systematically transform standard cache-oblivious recursive divide-and-conquer algorithms into recursive wavefront algorithms to achieve optimal parallel cache complexity and high parallelism under state-of-the-art schedulers for fork-join programs. Unlike COW algorithms these new algorithms do not use atomic operations. Instead, they use closed-form formulas to compute at what time each recursive function must be launched in order to achieve high parallelism without losing cache performance. The resulting implementations are arguably much simpler than implementations of known COW algorithms.