MIMD Programs Execution Support on SIMD Machines: A Holistic Survey

Abstract

The Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) architecture, supported by various high-performance computing platforms, efficiently utilizes data-level parallelism. The SIMD model is used in traditional CPUs, dedicated vector systems, and accelerators such as GPUs, vector extensions, and Xeon Phi. It provides performance throughput in computation-intensive and data-parallel applications. Despite the similarity of data-processing principles between these architectures, porting various programming models between the reviewed platforms is challenging. Furthermore, enhancing the programmability of these architectures is an important feature for utilizing their emerging computing power and simplifying programming complexity. This paper reviews the basic principles of optimization techniques to run asynchronous Multiple Instruction Multiple Data (MIMD) on SIMD accelerators. It also surveys several GPU programming paradigms and application programming interfaces (APIs) and classifies these frameworks into different groups based on their criteria. In addition, a review of studies that performed a comparison of the collaborative execution of GPUs with CPUs and Xeon Phi is presented in this paper. This study will be beneficial for developers and researchers in the field of computer architecture and parallel computing of intensive scientific applications, specifically for early-stage high-performance computing researchers, to obtain a brief overview of performance optimization opportunities as well as the challenges of existing SIMD platforms.

Keywords

• Accelerators
• asynchronous applications
• GPUs
• irregular applications
• SIMD