Parallel programming model for the Epiphany many-core coprocessor using threaded MPI

•We investigate the use of MPI for programming the Epiphany RISC array processor.•A threaded MPI implementation adapted for coprocessor offload is presented.•Existing MPI code for four scientific applications was re-used with minimal changes.•Demonstrated performance exceeds 12 GFLOPS with an efficiency over 20 GFLOPS/W.•Threaded MPI exhibits the highest performance reported using a standard parallel API.

The Adapteva Epiphany many-core architecture comprises a 2D tiled mesh Network-on-Chip (NoC) of low-power RISC cores with minimal uncore functionality. It offers high computational energy efficiency for both integer and floating point calculations as well as parallel scalability. Yet despite the interesting architectural features, a compelling programming model has not been presented to date. This paper demonstrates an efficient parallel programming model for the Epiphany architecture based on the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. Using MPI exploits the similarities between the Epiphany architecture and a conventional parallel distributed cluster of serial cores. Our approach enables MPI codes to execute on the RISC array processor with little modification and achieve high performance. We report benchmark results for the threaded MPI implementation of four algorithms (dense matrix–matrix multiplication, N-body particle interaction, five-point 2D stencil update, and 2D FFT) and highlight the importance of fast inter-core communication for the architecture.