Extending synchronization constructs in OpenMP to exploit pipeline parallelism on heterogeneous multi-core

Abstract

The ability of expressing multiple-levels of parallelism is one of the significant features in OpenMP parallel programming model. However, pipeline parallelism is not well supported in OpenMP. This paper proposes extensions to OpenMP directives, aiming at expressing pipeline parallelism effectively. The extended directives are divided into two groups. One can define the precedence at thread level while the other can define the precedence at iteration level. Through these directives, programmers can establish pipeline model more easily and exploit more parallelism to improve performance. To support these directives, a set of runtime interfaces for synchronization are implemented on the Cell heterogeneous multi-core architecture using signal block communications mechanism. Experimental results indicate that good performance can be obtained from the pipeline scheme proposed in this paper compared to the naive parallel applications. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.