high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Heterogeneous systems with CPUs and computational accelerators such as GPUs, FPGAs or the upcoming Intel MIC are becoming mainstream. In these systems, peak performance includes the performance of not just the CPUs but also all available accelerators. In spite of this fact, the majority of programming models for heterogeneous computing focus on only one of these. With the development of Accelerated OpenMP for GPUs, both from PGI and Cray, we have a clear path to extend traditional OpenMP applications incrementally to use GPUs. The extensions are geared toward switching from CPU parallelism to GPU parallelism. However they do not preserve the former while adding the latter. Thus computational potential is wasted since either the CPU cores or the GPU cores are left idle. Our goal is to create a runtime system that can intelligently divide an accelerated OpenMP region across all available resources automatically. This paper presents our proof-of-concept runtime system for dynamic task scheduling across CPUs and GPUs. Further, we motivate the addition of this system into the proposed OpenMP for Accelerators standard. Finally, we show that this option can produce as much as a two-fold performance improvement over using either the CPU or GPU alone.