Extending OpenMP to Survive the Heterogeneous Multi-Core Era

Abstract

This paper advances the state-of-the-art in programming models for exploiting task-level parallelism on heterogeneous many-core systems, presenting a number of extensions to the OpenMP language inspired in the StarSs programming model. The proposed extensions allow the programmer to write portable code easily for a number of different platforms, relieving him/her from developing the specific code to off-load tasks to the accelerators and the synchronization of tasks. Our results obtained from the StarSs instantiations for SMPs, the Cell, and GPUs report reasonable parallel performance. However, the real impact of our approach in is the productivity gains it yields for the programmer.