Using Preemptive Thread Migration to Load-Balance Data-Parallel Applications

Generic load balancing policies for irregular parallel applications may be efficiently implemented by integrating preemptive thread migration into the runtime support. In this context, a delicate issue is to manage pointer validity in a migration-safe way. In [1] we presented an iso-address approach to this problem. This paper discusses the impact of the iso-address migration scheme on the runtime of the Adaptor [4] HPF compiler. This runtime (previously modified so as to generate multithreaded code for our PM2 runtime system [3]) now provides a generic support for dynamic load balancing, using preemptive thread migration. We report some encouraging results obtained with our system on a HPF flame simulation code, a motivating application of HPF 2.0 [7].