Strategy for data-flow synchronizations in stencil parallel computations on multi-/manycore systems

In this paper, an innovative strategy for the data-flow synchronization in shared-memory systems is proposed. This strategy assumes to synchronize only interdependent threads instead of using the barrier approach that—in contrast to our approach—synchronize all threads. We demonstrate the adaptation of the data-flow synchronization strategy to two complex scientific applications based on stencil codes. An algorithm for the data-flow synchronization is developed and successfully used for both applications. The proposed approach is evaluated for various Intel microarchitectures released in the last 5 years, including the newest processors: Skylake and Knights Landing. The important part of this assessment is the performance comparison of the proposed data-flow synchronization with the OpenMP barrier. The experimental results show that the performance of the studied applications can be accelerated up to 1.3 times using the proposed data-flow synchronizations strategy.