A Graph-Oriented Task Manager for Small Multiprocessor Systems

This paper presents a new task manager aimed to general-purpose small-scale multiprocessors. It is designed to exploit complex parallelism structures from general applications. The manager uses an explicit parallelism encoding based on a topological description of the task dependence graph. A dedicated task manager decodes the parallelism information and builds a structured representation of the dependence graph in a queue bank. The queue bank design allows to efficiently extract the tasks ready to be executed and to implement synchronization between consecutive tasks. Simulations performed on SPLASH and image processing benchmarks validates the parallelism exploitation. Results shows that in case of complex parallel structures, performances can be significantly improved. Submitted to Europar 99, Topic 9: "Parallel Computer Architecture". Due to the number of concepts presented in this paper, a short publication as a research paper is not wished. The theoretical aspects of this work will be published in the Fourth International Conference of the ACPC (ACPC'99). It mainly presents the underlying task manager algorithm from the task graph approach. The current paper is essentially oriented towards the task manager implementation. On the opposite to the ACPC paper, it details well the queue bank structure, the parallelism description used and the software/hardware implementation issue. A graph-oriented task manager for small multiprocessor systems.