Evaluating OpenMP affinity on the POWER8 architecture

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

As we move toward pre-Exascale systems, two of the DOE leadership class systems will consist of very powerful OpenPOWER compute nodes which will be more complex to program. These systems will have massive amounts of parallelism; where threads may be running on POWER9 cores as well as on accelerators. Advances in memory interconnects, such as NVLINK, will provide a unified shared memory address spaces for different types of memories HBM, DRAM, etc. In preparation for such system, we need to improve our understanding on how OpenMP supports the concept of affinity as well as memory placement on POWER8 systems. Data locality and affinity are key program optimizations to exploit the compute and memory capabilities to achieve good performance by minimizing data motion across NUMA domains and access the cache efficiently. This paper is the first step to evaluate the current features of OpenMP 4.0 on the POWER8 processors, and on how to measure its effects on a system with two POWER8 sockets. We experiment with the different affinity settings provided by OpenMP 4.0 to quantify the costs of having good data locality vs not, and measure their effects via hardware counters. We also find out which affinity settings benefits more from data locality. Based on this study we describe the current state of art, the challenges we faced in quantifying effects of affinity, and ideas on how OpenMP 5.0 should be improved to address affinity in the context of NUMA domains and accelerators.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationOpenMP
Subtitle of host publicationMemory, Devices, and Tasks - 12th International Workshop on OpenMP, IWOMP 2016, Proceedings
EditorsNaoya Maruyama, Mohamed Wahib, Bronis R. de Supinski
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages35-46
Number of pages12
ISBN (Print)9783319455495
DOIs
StatePublished - 2016
Event12th International Workshop on OpenMP, IWOMP 2016 - Nara, Japan
Duration: Oct 5 2016Oct 7 2016

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume9903 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference12th International Workshop on OpenMP, IWOMP 2016
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityNara
Period10/5/1610/7/16

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science under the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program. This research used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725.

FundersFunder number
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Science
Advanced Scientific Computing ResearchDE-AC05-00OR22725

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Evaluating OpenMP affinity on the POWER8 architecture'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this