Agency v0.1.0

Summary

Agency 0.1.0 introduces new control structures such as bulk_invoke() for creating parallel tasks. A suite of new execution policies compose with these control structures to require different kinds of semantic guarantees from the created tasks. A new library of executors controls the mapping of tasks onto underlying execution resources such as CPUs, GPUs, and collections of multiple GPUs. In addition to these basic components, this release also introduces experimental support for a collection of utility types useful for creating Agency programs.

New Features

New Control Structures

• bulk_invoke
• bulk_async
• bulk_then

New Execution Policies

• concurrent_execution_policy
• sequenced_execution_policy
• parallel_execution_policy
• unsequenced_execution_policy
• CUDA-specific execution policies
  • cuda::concurrent_execution_policy
  • cuda::parallel_execution_policy
  • cuda::grid

New Executors

• concurrent_executor
• executor_array
• flattened_executor
• parallel_executor
• scoped_executor
• sequenced_executor
• unsequenced_executor
• vector_executor
• CUDA-specific executors
  • cuda::block_executor
  • cuda::concurrent_executor
  • cuda::grid_executor
  • cuda::grid_executor_2d
  • cuda::multidevice_executor
  • cuda::parallel_executor

New Experimental Utilities

• experimental::array
• experimental::bounded_integer
• experimental::optional
• experimental::short_vector
• experimental::span
• Fancy ranges based on the range-v3 library
  • experimental::chunk_view
  • experimental::counted_view
  • experimental::stride_view
  • experimental::zip_view

New Examples

• concurrent_ping_pong.cpp
• concurrent_sum.cpp
• fill.cpp
• hello_async.cpp
• hello_lambda.cpp
• hello_then.cpp
• hello_world.cpp
• ping_pong_tournament.cpp
• saxpy.cpp
• version.cpp
• CUDA-specific example programs
  • async_reduce.cu
  • black_scholes.cu
  • hello_device_lambda.cu
  • multigpu_saxpy.cu
  • saxpy.cu
  • simple_on.cu
  • transpose.cu

Known Issues

• #255 Agency is not known to work with any version of the Microsoft Compiler
• #256 Agency is not known to work with NVIDIA Compiler versions prior to 8.0
• #257 Agency is not known to work with NVIDIA GPU architectures prior to sm_3x

Acknowledgments

• Thanks to Michael Garland for significant input into Agency's overall design.
• Thanks to the NVIDIA compiler team, especially Jaydeep Marathe, for enhancements to nvcc's C++ support.
• Thanks to Steven Dalton, Mark Harris, and Evghenni Gaburov for testing this release during development.
• Thanks to Duane Merrill and Sean Baxter for design feedback.
• Thanks to Olivier Giroux for contributing an implementation of synchronic.