Using shared-data localization to reduce the cost of inspector-execution in unified-parallel-C programs

We improve performance of fine-grain UPC applications by orders of magnitude.We introduce a novel shared-data localization transformation.We present a thorough performance analysis and evaluation.We show that reducing run-time calls is crucial for performance.We achieve performance comparable to C and MPI using the UPC programming model. Programs written in the Unified Parallel C (UPC) language can access any location of the entire local and remote address space via read/write operations. However, UPC programs that contain fine-grained shared accesses can exhibit performance degradation. One solution is to use the inspector-executor technique to coalesce fine-grained shared accesses to larger remote access operations. A straightforward implementation of the inspector-executor transformation results in excessive instrumentation that hinders performance.This paper addresses this issue and introduces various techniques that aim at reducing the generated instrumentation code: a shared-data localization transformation based on Constant-Stride Linear Memory Descriptors (CSLMADs) S. Aarseth, Gravitational N-Body Simulations: Tools and Algorithms, Cambridge Monographs on Mathematical Physics, Cambridge University Press, 2003., the inlining of data locality checks and the usage of an index vector to aggregate the data. Finally, the paper introduces a lightweight loop code motion transformation to privatize shared scalars that were propagated through the loop body.A performance evaluation, using up to 2048 cores of a POWER 775, explores the impact of each optimization and characterizes the overheads of UPC programs. It also shows that the presented optimizations increase performance of UPC programs up to 1.8 × their UPC hand-optimized counterpart for applications with regular accesses and up to 6.3 × for applications with irregular accesses.