On the Evaluation of OpenMP Memory Access in Multi-core Architectures

Karim Fathallah (1) , Wahid Nasri (1) , Luiz Angelo Steffenel (2)

1 ESSTT - Ecole Supérieure des Sciences et Techniques [Tunis]
2 CRESTIC - Centre de Recherche en Sciences et Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication - EA 3804

OpenMP has gained wide popularity as an API for parallel programming on shared memory and distributed shared memory platforms. It is also a promising candidate to exploit the emerging multi-core, multi-threaded processors. In addition, there is an increasing trend to port OpenMP to more specific architectures like General Purpose Graphic Processor Units (GPGPUs). However, these ccNUMA (cache coherent Non-Uniform Memory Access) architectures may present several hierarchical memory levels, which represent a serious performance issue for OpenMP applications. In this work, we present the initial results from our effort to quantify and model the impact of memory access heterogeneity on the performance of the applications. Using a simplified performance model, we show how to identify a "performance signature" for a given platform, which allows us to predict the performance of sam- ple applications.

Domains: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing [cs.DC]

Karim Fathallah, Wahid Nasri, Luiz Angelo Steffenel. On the Evaluation of OpenMP Memory Access in Multi-core Architectures. 4th International Workshop on Automatic Performance Tuning (iWAPT 2009), Oct 2009, Tokio, Japan. ⟨hal-00510834⟩