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December 5, 2016
The OmpSs programming model and its runtime support
The talk will present a vision of how parallel computer architectures are evolving and some of the research being done at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) driven by such vision. We consider that the evolution towards increasing complexity, scale and variability in our systems makes two technologies play a very important role in future parallel computing, which with the advent of multicores means in general computing. On one side, performance analysis tools with very detailed analytics capabilities are key to understanding the actual behavior of our systems. On the other, programming models that hide the actual complexity of the underlying hardware are needed to ensure the programming productivity and performance portability needed to ensure the economic sustainability of the programing efforts. We will present the OmpSs programming model and development at BSC, a task based model for homogeneous and heterogeneous systems which acts as a forerunner for OpenMP. OmpSs targets in a uniform way multicores, accelerators and clusters. We will describe features of the NANOS++ runtime on which OmpSs is implemented, focusing on the dynamic scheduling capabilities and load balance support features. We will also present the BSC tools environment, including trace visualization capabilities and specific features to understand the actual behavior of the NANOS runtime and OmpSs programs.
