Effective runtime management of tasks and priorities in GNU OpenMP applications

OpenMP has become a reference standard for the design of parallel applications. This standard is evolving very fast, thus offering ever new opportunities to the application programmers. However, OpenMP runtime environments are often not fully aligned to the actual requirements imposed by the evolution of such standard. Among the main lacks, we find: (a) a limited capability to effectively cope with task priorities, and (b) the inadequacy in guaranteeing core properties while processing tasks such as the so called work-conservativeness—the ability of the OpenMP runtime environment to fully exploit the underlying multi-processor/multi-core machine through the avoidance of thread-blocking phases. In this article we present the design of extensions to the GNU OpenMP (GOMP) implementation, integrated into gcc, which allow the effective management of tasks and their priorities. Our proposal is based on a user-space library—modularly combined with the one already offered by GOMP—and an external kernel-level Linux module—offering the opportunity to exploit raising hardware facilities for the purpose of task/priority management. We also provide experimental results showing the effectiveness of our proposal, achieved by running either OpenMP common benchmarks or a new benchmark application (named Hashtag-Text) that we explicitly devised in order to stress the OpenMP runtime environment in relation to the above-mentioned task/priority management aspects.