Realm: An event-based low-level runtime for distributed memory architectures

We present Realm, an event-based runtime system for heterogeneous, distributed memory machines. Realm is fully asynchronous: all runtime actions are non-blocking. Realm supports spawning computations, moving data, and reservations, a novel synchronization primitive. Asynchrony is exposed via a light...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inPACT '14 : proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques : August 24-27, 2014, Edmonton, AB, Canada pp. 263 - 275
Main Authors Aiken, Alex, Bauer, Michael, Treichler, Sean
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published ACM 01.08.2014
Subjects
Computational modeling
deferred execution
distributed memory
events
Hardware
heterogeneous architectures
Java
Legion
Programming
Realm
reservations
Runtime
Semantics
Synchronization
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DOI10.1145/2628071.2628084

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Summary:We present Realm, an event-based runtime system for heterogeneous, distributed memory machines. Realm is fully asynchronous: all runtime actions are non-blocking. Realm supports spawning computations, moving data, and reservations, a novel synchronization primitive. Asynchrony is exposed via a light-weight event system capable of operating without central management. We describe an implementation of Realm that relies on a novel generational event data structure for efficiently handling large numbers of events in a distributed address space. Microbenchmark experiments show our implementation of Realm approaches the underlying hardware performance limits. We measure the performance of three real-world applications on the Keeneland supercomputer. Our results demonstrate that Realm confers considerable latency hiding to clients, attaining significant speedups over traditional bulk-synchronous and independently optimized MPI codes.
DOI:10.1145/2628071.2628084