Trends in Data Locality Abstractions for HPC Systems
File(s)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
The cost of data movement has always been an important concern in high performance computing (HPC) systems. It has now become the dominant factor in terms of both energy consumption and performance. Support for expression of data locality has been explored in the past, but those efforts have had only modest success in being adopted in HPC applications for various reasons. them However, with the increasing complexity of the memory hierarchy and higher parallelism in emerging HPC systems, locality management has acquired a new urgency. Developers can no longer limit themselves to low-level solutions and ignore the potential for productivity and performance portability obtained by using locality abstractions. Fortunately, the trend emerging in recent literature on the topic alleviates many of the concerns that got in the way of their adoption by application developers. Data locality abstractions are available in the forms of libraries, data structures, languages and runtime systems; a common theme is increasing productivity without sacrificing performance. This paper examines these trends and identifies commonalities that can combine various locality concepts to develop a comprehensive approach to expressing and managing data locality on future large-scale high-performance computing systems.
Date Issued
2017-05-10
Date Acceptance
2017-04-14
Citation
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 2017, 28 (10), pp.3007-3020
ISSN
1045-9219
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Start Page
3007
End Page
3020
Journal / Book Title
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
Volume
28
Issue
10
Copyright Statement
© 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Sponsor
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (E
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)
Grant Number
EP/I006761/1
EP/I00677X/1
EP/I012036/1
PO: ERZ1091603
EP/L000407/1
EP/M011054/1
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Computer Science, Theory & Methods
Engineering, Electrical & Electronic
Computer Science
Engineering
Data locality
programming abstractions
high-performance computing
data layout
locality-aware runtimes
ARCHITECTURE
SOFTWARE
LANGUAGE
Publication Status
Published