Automatic Scheduling of Compute Kernels Across Heterogeneous Architectures

The world of high-performance computing has shifted from increasing single-core performance to extracting performance from heterogeneous multi- and many-core processors due to the power, memory and instruction-level parallelism walls. All trends point towards increased processor heterogeneity as a means for increasing application performance, from smartphones to servers. These various architectures are designed for different types of applications — traditional "big" CPUs (like the Intel Xeon) are optimized for low latency while other architectures (such as the NVidia Tesla K20x) are optimized for high-throughput. These architectures have different tradeoffs and different performance profiles, meaning fantastic performance gains for the right types of applications. However applications that are ill-suited for a given architecture may experience significant slowdown; therefore, it is imperative that applications are scheduled onto the correct processor.

In order to perform this scheduling, applications must be analyzed to determine their execution characteristics. Traditionally this application-to-hardware mapping was determined statically by the programmer. However, this requires intimate knowledge of the application and underlying architecture, and precludes load-balancing by the system. We demonstrate and empirically evaluate a system for automatically scheduling compute kernels by extracting program characteristics and applying machine learning techniques. We develop a machine learning process that is system-agnostic, and works for a variety of contexts (e.g. embedded, desktop/workstation, server). Finally, we perform scheduling in a workload-aware and workload-adaptive manner for these compute kernels.