In this work, we utilize dynamic dataflow/data-driven techniques to improve the performance of high performance computing (HPC) systems. The proposed techniques are implemented and evaluated through an efficient, portable, and robust programming framework that enables data-driven concurrency on HPC systems. The proposed framework is based on data-driven multithreading (DDM), a hybrid control-flow/dataflow model that schedules threads based on data availability on sequential processors. The proposed framework was evaluated using several benchmarks, with different characteristics, on two different systems: a 4-node AMD system with a total of 128 cores and a 64-node Intel HPC system with a total of 768 cores. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed framework scales well and tolerates scheduling overheads and memory latencies effectively. We also compare our framework to MPI, DDM-VM, and OmpSs@Cluster. The comparison results show that the proposed framework obtains comparable or better performance.

The exponential growth of sequential processors has come to an end, and thus, parallel processing is probably the only way to achieve performance growth. We propose the development of parallel architectures based on data-driven scheduling. Data-driven scheduling enforces only a partial ordering as dictated by the true data dependencies, which is the minimum synchronization possible. This is very beneficial for parallel processing because it enables it to exploit the maximum possible parallelism. We provide architectural support for data-driven execution for the Data-Driven Multithreading (DDM) model. In the past, DDM has been evaluated mostly in the form of virtual machines. The main contribution of this work is the development of a highly efficient hardware support for data-driven execution and its integration into a multicore system with eight cores on a Virtex-6 FPGA. The DDM semantics make barriers and cache coherence unnecessary, which reduces the synchronization latencies significantly and makes the cache simpler. The performance evaluation has shown that the support for data-driven execution is very efficient with negligible overheads. Our prototype can support very small problem sizes (matrix 16×16) and ultra-lightweight threads (block of 4x4) that achieve speedups close to linear. Such results cannot be achieved by software-based systems.