Chunking for Dynamic Linear Pipelines

Dynamic scheduling and dynamic creation of the pipeline structure are crucial for efficient execution of pipelined programs. Nevertheless, dynamic systems imply higher overhead than static systems. Therefore, chunking is the key to decrease the synchronization and scheduling overhead by grouping activities. We present a chunking algorithm for dynamic systems that handles dynamic linear pipelines, which allow the number and duration of stages to be determined at run-time. The evaluation on 44 cores shows that chunking brings the overhead of dynamic scheduling down to that of a static scheduler, and it enables efficient and scalable execution of fine-grained dynamic linear pipelines.