Analysis and Characterization of Performance Variability for OpenMP Runtime

In the high performance computing (HPC) domain, performance variability is a major scalability issue for parallel computing applications with heavy synchronization and communication. In this paper, we present an experimental performance analysis of OpenMP benchmarks regarding the variation of execution time, and determine the potential factors causing performance variability. Our work offers some understanding of performance distributions and directions for future work on how to mitigate variability for OpenMP-based applications. Two representative OpenMP benchmarks from the EPCC OpenMP micro-benchmark suite and BabelStream are run across two x86 multicore platforms featuring up to 256 threads. From the obtained results, we characterize and explain the execution time variability as a function of thread-pinning, simultaneous multithreading (SMT) and core frequency variation.