Runtime Systems for Extreme Scale Platforms

Future extreme-scale systems are expected to contain homogeneous and heterogeneous many-core processors, with O103 cores per node and O106 nodes overall. Effective combination of inter-node and intra-node parallelism is recognized to be a major software challenge for such systems. Further, applications will have to deal with constrained energy budgets as well as frequent faults and failures. To aid programmers manage these complexities and enhance programmability, much of recent research has focused on designing state-of-art software runtime systems. Such runtime systems are expected to be a critical component of the software ecosystem for the management of parallelism, locality, load balancing, energy and resilience on extreme-scale systems. In this dissertation, we address three key challenges faced by a runtime system using a dynamic task parallel framework for extreme-scale computing.