Hyperplane Grouping and Pipelined Schedules: How to Execute Tiled Loops Fast on Clusters of SMPs

This paper proposes a novel approach for the parallel execution of tiled Iteration Spaces onto a cluster of SMP PC nodes. Each SMP node has multiple CPUs and a single memory mapped PCI-SCI Network Interface Card. We apply a hyperplane-based grouping transformation to the tiled space, so as to group together independent neighboring tiles and assign them to the same SMP node. In this way, intranode (intragroup) communication is annihilated. Groups are atomically executed inside each node. Nodes exchange data between successive group computations. We schedule groups much more efficiently by exploiting the inherent overlapping between communication and computation phases among successive atomic group executions. The applied non-blocking schedule resembles a pipelined datapath, where group computation phases are overlapped with communication ones, instead of being interleaved with them. Our experimental results illustrate that the proposed method outperforms previous approaches involving blocking communication or conventional grouping schemes.