CppCon 2017: Hartmut Kaiser “The Asynchronous C++ Parallel Programming Model”

In this talk we present a new asynchronous C parallel programming model which is built around lightweight tasks and mechanisms to orchestrate massively parallel (and distributed) execution. This model uses the concept of (std) futures to make data dependencies explicit, employs explicit and implicit asynchrony to hide latencies and to improve utilization, and manages finer-grain parallelism with a work-stealing scheduling system enabling automatic load-balancing of tasks. As a result of combining those capabilities the programming model exposes auto-parallelization capabilities as emergent properties. We have implemented the this model as a C library exposing a higher-level parallelism API which is fully conforming to the existing C 11/14/17 standards and is aligned with the ongoing standardization work. This API and programming model has shown to enable writing parallel and distributed applications for heterogeneous resources with excellent performance and scaling characteristics.