ParalleX: A New Execution Model for Sustainable HPC Design
Dr. Thomas Sterling
Department of Computer Science
Center for Computation and Technology
Louisiana State University
Historically, technology and computer architecture have evolved together, mutually complementing each others advances. Underlying these developments have been transitions in execution models, the set of abstract principles that govern the structure, semantics, and operation from programming languages and compilers through runtime and operating systems, to system and micro-architectures. But over the last decade and a half we have been fixed in the dominant model, Communicating Sequential Processes or message passing even as technology has improved by at least two orders of magnitude over the same period. Most recently, power and complexities issues have forced the vendor industry to deploy multi-core components, chips with more than one processor. Severe challenges face continued growth of effective computing with system scale. This presentation will discuss the challenges to sustainable high performance computer design and describe a new class of system architectures, Long Bow, in combination with ParalleX, a new execution model providing a governing discipline to guide is structure and logical operation. Long Bow is a heterogeneous architecture with components optimized for different regimes of computational temporal locality. ParalleX address such challenges as latency, overhead, contention, and starvation within the computing framework by means of a model based on message-driven split-phase transactions coordinated by local in-memory synchronization constructs. Statistical parametric studies will be described that demonstrate that one to two orders of magnitude improved performance could be achieved by means of conventional technologies through a new class of parallel architectures and execution model.