Harmony: an execution model and runtime for heterogeneous many core systems

The emergence of heterogeneous many core architectures presents a unique opportunity for delivering order of magnitude performance increases to high performance applications by matching certain classes of algorithms to specifically tailored architectures. Their ubiquitous adoption, however, has been limited by a lack of programming models and management frameworks designed to reduce the high degree of complexity of software development intrinsic to heterogeneous architectures. This paper proposes Harmony, a runtime supported programming and execution model that provides: (1) semantics for simplifying parallelism management, (2) dynamic scheduling of compute intensive kernels to heterogeneous processor resources, and (3) online monitoring driven performance optimization for heterogeneous many core systems. We are particulably concerned with simplifying development and ensuring binary portability and scalability across system configurations and sizes. Initial results from ongoing development demonstrate the binary compatibility with variable number of cores, as well as dynamic adaptation of schedules to data sets. We present preliminary results of key features for some benchmark applications.