high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Experience shows that on today’s high performance systems the utilization of different acceleration cards in conjunction with a high utilization of all other parts of the system is difficult. Future architectures, like exascale clusters, are expected to aggravate this issue as the number of cores are expected to increase and memory hierarchies are expected to become deeper. One big aspect for distributed applications is to guarantee high utilization of all available resources, including local or remote acceleration cards on a cluster while fully using all the available CPU resources and the integration of the GPU work into the overall programming model. For the integration of CUDA code we extended HPX, a general purpose C++ run time system for parallel and distributed applications of any scale, and enabled asynchronous data transfers from and to the GPU device and the asynchronous invocation of CUDA kernels on this data. Both operations are well integrated into the general programming model of HPX which allows to seamlessly overlap any GPU operation with work on the main cores. Any user defined CUDA kernel can be launched on any (local or remote) GPU device available to the distributed application. We present asynchronous implementations for the data transfers and kernel launches for CUDA code as part of a HPX asynchronous execution graph. Using this approach we can combine all remotely and locally available acceleration cards on a cluster to utilize its full performance capabilities. Overhead measurements show, that the integration of the asynchronous operations (data transfer + launches of the kernels) as part of the HPX execution graph imposes no additional computational overhead and significantly eases orchestrating coordinated and concurrent work on the main cores and the used GPU devices.