Work stealing for multi-core HPC clusters

Abstract

Today a significant fraction of HPC clusters are built from multi-core machines connected via a high speed interconnect, hence, they have a mix of shared memory and distributed memory. Work stealing algorithms are currently designed for either a shared memory architecture or for a distributed memory architecture and are extended to work on these multi-core clusters by assuming a single underlying architecture. However, as the number of cores in each node increase, the differences between a shared memory architecture and a distributed memory architecture become more acute. Current work stealing approaches are not suitable for multi-core clusters due to the dichotomy of the underlying architecture. We combine the best aspects of both the current approaches in to a new algorithm. Our algorithm allows for more efficient execution of large-scale HPC applications, such as UTS, on clusters which have large multi-cores. As the number of cores per node increase, which is inevitable given today's processor trends, such an approach is crucial. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.