Effective Runtime Management of Tasks and Priorities in GNU OpenMP Applications

OpenMP has become a reference standard for the design of parallel applications. This standard is evolving quickly, thus offering new opportunities to the application programmers. However, OpenMP runtime environments are often not fully aligned with the actual requirements imposed by the evolution of such a standard. Among the main lacks, we find: (a) a limited capability to effectively cope with task priorities, and (b) the inadequacy in guaranteeing core properties while processing tasks such as the so-called
work-conservativeness
—the ability of the OpenMP runtime environment to fully exploit the underlying multi-processor/multi-core machine through the avoidance of thread-blocking phases. In this article, we present the design of extensions to the GNU OpenMP (
GOMP
) implementation, integrated into
gcc
, which allow the effective management of tasks and their priorities. Our proposal is based on a user-space library—modularly combined with the one already offered by
GOMP
—and an external kernel-level Linux module—offering the opportunity to exploit raising hardware facilities for task/priority management. We also provide experimental results showing the effectiveness of our proposal, achieved by running either OpenMP common benchmarks or a new benchmark application (
Hashtag-Text
) that we explicitly devised to stress the runtime environment in relation to the above-mentioned task/priority management aspects.