Session

DescriptionHPC systems are increasingly heterogeneous and massively parallel. This creates unique challenges in fully utilizing all resources available on a node. Application developers have to expose enough parallelism to take advantage of the increasing core counts. At the same time, communication between both on-node components and inter-node components is becoming harder to manage. The fork-join programming paradigm is the preferred choice for most applications because of its simplicity and often straightforward application to serial programs. However, it imposes significant limitations to performance with its implicit global barriers. Asynchrony is becoming a requirement to hide latencies and is even starting to see wider use in more traditional libraries. Relaxing data and task dependencies is also an important technique to expose more parallelism in an application. These are all ideas that task-based programming brings to users, and which are making their way into more more established libraries, and pushing applications, libraries, and languages in new directions. This minisymposium brings together implementers and users of task-based programming frameworks and aims to discuss the benefits, recent advances, and remaining challenges in making task-based programming usable and accessible to everyone.