Porting and Evaluation of a Distributed Task-driven Stencil-based Application

Abstract

Alternative programming models and runtimes are increasing in popularity and maturity. This allows porting and comparing, on competitive grounds, emerging parallel approaches against the traditional MPI+X paradigm. In this work, an implementation of distributed task-based stencil computation is compared with a traditional MPI+X implementation of the same application. The Legion task-based parallel programming system is used as an alternative to MPI, but the underlying OpenMP approach is kept at the subdomain level. Overall results are promising toward making this alternative method competitive to the traditional MPI approach. In future work, extensions to other applications will be explored, as well as the use of GPUs.