A Vertex Cut based Framework for Load Balancing and Parallelism Optimization in Multi-core Systems

Abstract

High-level applications, such as machine learning, are evolving from simple models based on multilayer perceptrons for simple image recognition to much deeper and more complex neural networks for self-driving vehicle control systems.The rapid increase in the consumption of memory and computational resources by these models demands the use of multi-core parallel systems to scale the execution of the complex emerging applications that depend on them. However, parallel programs running on high-performance computers often suffer from data communication bottlenecks, limited memory bandwidth, and synchronization overhead due to irregular critical sections. In this paper, we propose a framework to reduce the data communication and improve the scalability and performance of these applications in multi-core systems. We design a vertex cut framework for partitioning LLVM IR graphs into clusters while taking into consideration the data communication and workload balance among clusters. First, we construct LLVM graphs by compiling high-level programs into LLVM IR, instrumenting code to obtain the execution order of basic blocks and the execution time for each memory operation, and analyze data dependencies in dynamic LLVM traces. Next, we formulate the problem as Weight Balanced $p$-way Vertex Cut, and propose a generic and flexible framework, wherein four different greedy algorithms are proposed for solving this problem. Lastly, we propose a memory-centric run-time mapping of the linear time complexity to map clusters generated from the vertex cut algorithms onto a multi-core platform. We conclude that our best algorithm, WB-Libra, provides performance improvements of 1.56x and 1.86x over existing state-of-the-art approaches for 8 and 1024 clusters running on a multi-core platform, respectively.