[GSoC] Work Stealing Scheduling on the Parallella

[camelia]

Hello,

My name is Camelia and I carry out research as a PhD Student in Computer Science.
Lately I have been teaching Parallel Programming laboratories (MPI) as a junior teaching assistant at my faculty (Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science).

I am really interested in working on the project "Work Stealing Scheduling on the Parallella" and I am confident that I can successfully contribute to it during this year's GSoC.
Hopefully, I'll be able to apply the knowledge obtained from this experience to my research subject too.

I quote from the project idea: "A concurrent model based on Cilk was developed in order to alleviate the task of writing parallel programs on the Parallella. Initially, a work stealing scheduler was implemented for run of the mill x86 multi core machines in order to ensure that the scheduler worked as expected and delivered high performance".

Can You please indicate me the link to this starting point and other Github repositoories that are relevant for this project?

Also where can I learn more about Parallella programming model and primitives?

Thank You very much!
Looking forward to Your answer as soon as possible.

Best regards,
Camelia

[José Valim]

Welcome Camelia!

Just in case you haven't seen it, there has already been some discussion on another thread in this mailing list:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/beam-community/0-T5wyzRVrA

I believe it sheds some light on some of your questions.

José Valim

www.plataformatec.com.br

Skype: jv.ptec

Founder and Lead Developer

[Luca Favatella]

Hi Camelia,

On 11/03/2014 13:39, José Valim wrote:
> Welcome Camelia!
>
> Just in case you haven't seen it, there has already been some discussion
> on another thread in this mailing list:
>
> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/beam-community/0-T5wyzRVrA
>
> I believe it sheds some light on some of your questions.

The thread José pointed you to contains relevant info indeed - please
read that.


[...]

> On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 4:20 AM, camelia <cameli...@yahoo.com

> <mailto:cameli...@yahoo.com>> wrote:
[...]

> I quote from the project idea: "A concurrent model based on Cilk was
> developed in order to alleviate the task of writing parallel
> programs on the Parallella. Initially, a work stealing scheduler was
> implemented for run of the mill x86 multi core machines in order to
> ensure that the scheduler worked as expected and delivered high
> performance".
>
> Can You please indicate me the link to this starting point and other
> Github repositoories that are relevant for this project?

That implementation is not open source - at least at the moment - but it
is a plain implementation on pthreads of Cilk as described at
http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/PPoPP95.pdf

Implementations of (flavours of) Cilk already open source include:
* http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/cilk/
* https://www.cilkplus.org/which-license (GCC and LLVM)

> Also where can I learn more about Parallella programming model and
> primitives?

Apart from presentations like http://codemesh.io/#andreas-olofsson , you
can refer to the Epiphany Architecture Reference and SDK Reference at
http://www.parallella.org/board/


The project involves enhancing the Erlang VM with Parallella/Cilk, so
you may consider getting familiar with the Erlang VM, in particular the
Erlang concurrency model (spawn/send/receive), Erlang VM's scheduler and
Core Erlang. Some resources:
https://github.com/erlang/otp

https://www.erlang-solutions.com/resources/webinars/understanding-erlang-scheduler

I understand this last point is not explicit from the proposal - I aim
to update that by tomorrow.

Regards
Luca

[Luca Favatella]

Hi Camelia,

Please let me know if you have any further questions as I understand the
proposal submission deadline is this afternoon UTC.

There are some clarifications on the updated proposal at the thread below:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/beam-community/0-T5wyzRVrA

Cheers
Luca