Abstraction Layer For Standardizing APIs of Task-Based Engines

Abstract

AL4SAN is a lightweight library for abstracting the APIs of task-based runtime engines. AL4SAN unifies the expression of tasks and their data dependencies. It supports various dynamic runtime systems relying on compiler technology and user-defined APIs. It enables a single application to employ different runtimes and their respective scheduling components, while providing user-obliviousness to the underlying hardware configurations. AL4SAN exposes common front-end APIs and connects to different backend runtimes. AL4SAN enables runtime interoperability by switching runtimes at runtime. Blending runtime systems permits to achieve a twofold speedup on a task-based generalized symmetric eigenvalue solver, relative to state-ofthe- art implementations. The ultimate goal of AL4SAN is not to create a new runtime, but to strengthen co-design of existing runtimes/applications, while facilitating user productivity and code portability.