ICL Research Profile

Distributed Tasking for Exascale

Overview

The Distributed Tasking for Exascale (DTE) project was part of the Exascale Computing Project (ECP). It has extended the capabilities of ICL’s Parallel Runtime and Execution Controller (PaRSEC)—a generic framework for architecture-aware scheduling and management of microtasks on distributed, many-core, heterogeneous architectures. The PaRSEC environment provides a runtime component for dynamically executing tasks on heterogeneous distributed systems along with a productivity toolbox and development framework that supports multiple domain-specific languages (DSLs) and extensions and tools for debugging, trace collection, and analysis.

PaRSEC also enables fast prototyping DSLs to express the dependencies between tasks. It provides a stable, scalable, and efficient distributed runtime so they can run on any execution platform at any scale. The underlying dataflow paradigm attacks both sides of the exascale challenge: managing extreme-scale parallelism and maintaining the performance portability of the code. The DTE project has been a vital extension and continuation of this effort. It has ensured that PaRSEC meets the critical needs of ECP application communities regarding scalability, interoperability, and productivity.