StarPU is a runtime system that offers support for heterogeneous multicore machines. While many efforts are devoted to design efficient computation kernels for those architectures (e.g. to implement BLAS kernels on GPUs), StarPU not only takes care of offloading such kernels (and implementing data coherency across the machine), but it also makes sure the kernels are executed as efficiently as possible.
StarPU is not a new language, and it does not extend existing languages either. StarPU does not help to write computation kernels.
While StarPU will not make it easier to write computation kernels, it does simplify their actual offloading as StarPU handle most low level aspects transparently.
Obviously, it is crucial to have efficient kernels, but it must be noted that the way those kernels are mapped and scheduled onto the computational resources also affect the overall performance to a great extent.
StarPU is especially helpful when considering multiple heterogeneous processing resources: statically mapping and synchronizing tasks in such a heterogeneous environment is already very difficult, making it in a portable way is virtually impossible. On the other hand, the scheduling capabilities of StarPU makes it possible to easily exploit all processors at the same time while taking advantage of their specificities in a portable fashion.
- make
- gcc (version >= 4.1)
- if CUDA support is enabled
- CUDA (version >= 2.2)
- CUBLAS (version >= 2.2)
- if OpenCL support is enabled
- AMD SDK >= 2.3 if AMD driver is used
- CUDA >= 3.2 if NVIDIA driver is used
- extra requirements for the git version (we usually use the Debian testing versions)
- autoconf (version >= 2.60)
- automake
- makeinfo
- libtool (version >= 2)
Remark: It is strongly recommanded that you also install the hwloc library before installing StarPU. This permits StarPU to actually map the processing units according to the machine topology. For more details on hwloc, see http://www.open-mpi.org/projects/hwloc/ .
StarPU is available on https://gitlab.inria.fr/starpu/starpu
The GIT repository access can be checked out with the following command.
$ git clone git@gitlab.inria.fr:starpu/starpu.git
Please skip this step if you are building from a tarball.
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install
StarPU can be built using MinGW or Cygwin. To avoid the cygwin dependency,
we provide MinGW-built binaries. The build process produces libstarpu.dll
,
libstarpu.def
, and libstarpu.lib
, which should be enough to use it from e.g.
Microsoft Visual Studio.
Update the video drivers to the latest stable release available for your hardware. Old ATI drivers (< 2.3) contain bugs that cause OpenCL support in StarPU to hang or exhibit incorrect behaviour.
For details on the Windows build process, see the INSTALL file.
Batch files are provided to run StarPU applications under Microsoft
Visual C. They are installed in path_to_starpu/bin/msvc
.
To execute a StarPU application, you first need to set the environment
variable STARPU_PATH
.
c:\....> cd c:\cygwin\home\ci\starpu\
c:\....> set STARPU_PATH=c:\cygwin\home\ci\starpu\
c:\....> cd bin\msvc
c:\....> starpu_open.bat starpu_simple.c
The batch script will run Microsoft Visual C with a basic project file to run the given application.
The batch script starpu_clean.bat
can be used to delete all
compilation generated files.
The batch script starpu_exec.bat
can be used to compile and execute a
StarPU application from the command prompt.
c:\....> cd c:\cygwin\home\ci\starpu\
c:\....> set STARPU_PATH=c:\cygwin\home\ci\starpu\
c:\....> cd bin\msvc
c:\....> starpu_exec.bat ..\..\..\..\examples\basic_examples\hello_world.c
MSVC StarPU Execution
...
/out:hello_world.exe
...
Hello world (params = {1, 2.00000})
Callback function got argument 0000042
c:\....>
Doxygen documentation is available in doc/doxygen
. If the doxygen
tools are available on the machine, pdf and html documentation can be
generated by running
$ make -C doc
Some examples ready to run are installed into $prefix/lib/starpu/{examples,mpi}
To upgrade your source code from older version (there were quite a few
renamings), use the tools/dev/rename.sh
script.
For any questions regarding StarPU, please contact the starpu-devel mailing-list at starpu-devel@inria.fr.