Efficiently combining parallel software using fine-grained, language-level, hierarchical resource management policies

Abstract

This paper presents Poli-C, a language extension, runtime library, and system daemon enabling fine-grained, language-level, hierarchical resource management policies. Poli-C is suitable for use in applications that compose parallel libraries, frameworks, and programs. In particular, we have added a powerful new statement to C for expressing resource limits and guarantees in such a way that programmers can set resource management policies even when the source code of parallel libraries and frameworks is not available. Poli-C enables application programmers to manage any resource exposed by the underlying OS, for example cores or IO bandwidth. Additionally, we have developed a domain-specific language for defining high-level resource management policies, and a facility for extending the kinds of resources that can be managed with our language extension. Finally, through a number of useful variations, our design offers a high degree of composability. We evaluate Poli-C by way of three case-studies: a scientific application, an image processing webserver, and a pair of parallel database join implementations. We found that using Poli-C yields efficiency gains that require the addition of only a few lines of code to applications.