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Abstract:

Parallel computing is becoming increasing central and mainstream, driven both by the widespread availability of commodity SMP and high-performance cluster platforms, as well as the growing use of parallelism in general-purpose applications such as image recognition, virtual reality, and media processing. In addition to performance requirements, the latter computations impose soft real-time constraints, necessitating efficient, predictable parallel resource management. Unfortunately, traditional resource management approaches in both parallel and real-time systems are inadequate for meeting this objective; the parallel approaches focus primarily on improving application performance and/or system utilization at the cost of arbitrarily delaying a given application, while the real-time approaches are overly conservative sacrificing system utilization in order to meet application deadlines. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for increasing parallel system utilization while meeting application soft real-time deadlines. Our approach exploits the application tunability found in several general-purpose computations. Tunability refers to an application’s ability to trade off resource requirements over time, while maintaining a desired level of output quality. In other words, a large allocation of resources in one stage of the computation’s lifetime may compensate, in a parameterizable manner, for a smaller allocation in another stage. We first describe language extensions to support tunability in the Calypso programming system, a component of the MILAN metacomputing project, and evaluate their expressiveness using an image processing application. We then characterize the performance benefits of tunability, using a synthetic task system to systematically identify its benefits and shortcomings. Our results are very encouraging: application tunability is convenient to express, and can significantly improve parallel system utilization for computations with predictability requirements. 1

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