D-STHARk: Evaluating Dynamic Scheduling of Tasks in Hybrid Simulated Architectures

The emergence of applications that demand to handle efficiently growing amounts of data has stimulated the development of new computing architectures with several Processing Units (PUs), such as CPUs core, graphics processing units (GPUs) and Intel Xeon Phi (MIC). Aiming to better exploit these architectures, recent works focus on proposing novel runtime environments that offer a variety of methods for scheduling tasks dynamically on different PUs. A main limitation of such proposals refers to the constrained system configurations, usually adopted to tune and test the proposals, since setting more complete and diversified evaluation environments is costly. In this context, we present D-STHARk, a GUI tool for evaluating Dynamic Scheduling of Tasks in Hybrid Simulated ARchitectures. D-STHARk provides a complete simulated execution environment that allows evaluating dynamic scheduling strategies on simulated applications and hybrid architectures. We evaluate our tool by simulating the dynamic scheduling strategies presented in [3], using the same architecture and application. D-STHARk was able to achieve the same conclusions originally reported by the authors. Moreover, we performed an experiment varying the number of coprocessors, which was not previously verified due to lack of real architectures, showing that we may reduce the energy consumption, while keeping the same performance.