XPRESS: eXascale PRogramming Environment and System Software, Final Report

Abstract

The University of Oregon (UO) was a partner in the XPRESS project together with Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), Indiana University (IU), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL), Louisiana State University (LSU), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), University of Houston (UH), and University of North Carolina (RENCI). UO's objective in the project was to develop "APEX (Asynchronous Performance Environment for eXascale)": performance measurement, analysis, feedback and control infrastructure to asynchronous tasking runtimes, specifically HPX (LSU) and HPX-5 (IU). During the project period, our efforts focused on the need to measure complex tasking models where the traditional instrumentation methods would not work due to an absent/meaningless call-path context and runtime control of task pre-emption and resumption, usually on a different operating system thread. In addition to the challenges of performance measurement, we developed a framework to provide information from all levels of the stack (hardware, operating system, runtime, application) to a feedback & control mechanism for controlling concurrency, task granularity, networking parameters, and other aspects of execution in order to improve execution performance, throughput and/or efficiency. UO demonstrated these developments on leading edge HPC machines at large scale, including a 2017 Gordon Bell submission in which APEX was used to optimize key bottlenecks in an astrophysics application. The following final report summarizes our accomplishments during the XPRESS project.