Prioritized Asynchronous Calls for Parallel Processing on Responsive MultiThreaded Processor

With the advent of parallel processors for embedded systems, it is very important to design new runtime and system features so that embedded software developers can take advantage of the increased throughput and responsiveness without the hindrances of low-level synchronization and data sharing. In this paper, we design and implement a fully-prioritized, work-conserving, and event-driven parallel computing runtime on Responsive MultiThreaded Processor (RMTP), a simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) processing platform with priority for real-time systems, which implements hardware-based resource allocation and context switching. The proposed runtime achieves low-cost forks and fine-grained prioritized scheduling by using special-purpose hardware functionalities on the RMTP, and also reduces resource over-subscription penalties while allowing for dynamic parallelism by employing a continuation-stealing execution strategy. We evaluate the performance of the proposed system with a set of benchmarks derived from the MiBench suite, and show that meaningful speedup can be achieved even when the degree of parallelism at each level is dynamically varied.