Design and evaluation of a plain MPI-based cluster execution backend for the SkePU 3 skeleton programming framework

Abstract: SkePU 3 is a framework for parallel program execution that uses higher order functions called skeletons, which provide a layer of abstraction between user code and the parallel implementation it provides through its backends. The backend that enables SkePU to run on an HPC cluster has a slowdown of a factor two. This reduces the viability of SkePU as an alternative for HPC, and as such, warrants an investigation. Programs written in SkePU are sequential-looking, single-source C++ programs where skeleton calls can transparently execute on multiple different types of processing units, such as CPU cores, GPUs and clusters, using different backends. In this thesis, a strategy for improving the performance of SkePU on clusters is presented, and with it, the design and implementation of a new cluster backend that is simpler and more closely integrated with the non-cluster SkePU code base. Runtime measurements are made, which show that the new cluster backend sees a relative speedup of about a factor of two, which effectively eliminates the slowdown.