ovni/doc/emulation/nanos6.md

Nanos6 model

The Nanos6 runtime library implements the OmpSs-2 tasking model, which schedules the execution of tasks with dependencies. For more information see the OmpSs-2 website and the Nanos6 repository.

The library is instrumented to track the execution of tasks and also the execution path inside the runtime library to identify what is happening. This information is typically used by both the users and the developers of the Nanos6 library to analyze problems and unwanted behaviors. Towards this goal, four different Paraver views are generated, which are explained below.

The state of each task is modelled in a simple finite state machine, which identifies the main state changes of the task. The task is set to the Running state only when is executing the body of the task, consisting of user defined code. The states can be observed in the following diagram:

Task ID view

The task ID view represents the ID of the Nanos6 task instance that is currently executing on each thread. This ID is a monotonically increasing identifier assigned on task creation. Lower IDs correspond to tasks created at an earlier point than higher IDs.

Task type view

Every task in Nanos6 contains a task type, which roughly corresponds to the actual location in the code a task was declared. For example if a function is declared as a Nanos6 task, and it is called multiple times in a program, every created task will have a different ID, but the same type.

In the view, each type is shown with a label declared in the source with the label attribute of the task. If no label was specified, one is automatically generated for each type.

Note that in this view, the numeric event value is a hash function of the type label, so two distinct types (tasks declared in different parts of the code) with the same label will share the event value and have the same color.

MPI rank view

This view shows the numeric MPI rank of the process running the current task. It is only shown when the task is in the running state. This view is specially useful to identify task in a distributed workload, which spans several nodes.

Subsystem view

The subsystem view attempts to provide a general overview of what Nanos6 is doing at any point in time. This view is more complex to understand than the others but is generally the most useful to understand what is happening and debug problems related with Nanos6 itself.

The view shows the state of the runtime for each thread (and for each CPU, the state of the running thread in that CPU).

The state is computed by the following method: the runtime code is completely divided into sections of code (machine instructions) $S_1, S_2, \ldots, S_N$, which are instrumented (an event is emitted when entering and exiting each section), and one common section of code which is shared across the subsystems, `U`, of no interest. We also assume any other code not belonging to the runtime belongs to the `U` section.

!!! remark

 Every instruction of the runtime belongs to *exactly one section*.

To determine the state of a thread, we look into the stack to see what is the top-most instrumented section.

At any given point in time, a thread may be executing code with a stack that spawns multiple sections, for example $[ S_1, U, S_2, S_3, U ]$ (the last is current stack frame). The subsystem view selects the last subsystem section from the stack ignoring the common section `U`, and presents that section as the current state of the execution, in this case the section `S_3`.

Additionally, the runtime sections `S_i` are grouped together in subsystems, which form a closely related group of functions. The complete list of subsystems and sections is shown below.

When there is no instrumented section in the thread stack, the state is set to No subsystem.

Task subsystem

The Task subsystem contains the code that controls the life cycle of tasks. It contains the following sections:

• Running: Executing the body of the task (user defined code).

• Spawning function: Spawning a function as task (it will be submitted to the scheduler for later execution).

• Creating: Creating a new task, through nanos6_create_task

• Submitting: Submitting a recently created task, through nanos6_submit_task

Scheduler subsystem

The Scheduler system groups the actions that relate to the queueing and dequeueing of ready tasks. It contains the following sections:

• Waiting for tasks: Actively waiting for tasks inside the scheduler subsystem, registered but not holding the scheduler lock

• Serving tasks: Inside the scheduler lock, serving tasks to other threads

• Adding ready tasks: Adding tasks to the scheduler queues, but outside of the scheduler lock.

Dependency subsystem

The Dependency system only contains the code that manages the registration of task dependencies. It contains the following sections:

• Registering: Registering a task's dependencies

• Unregistering: Releasing a task's dependencies because it has ended

Blocking subsystem

The Blocking subsystem deals with the code stops the thread execution. It contains the following sections:

• Taskwait: Task is blocked while inside a taskwait

• Blocking current task: Task is blocked through the Nanos6 blocking API

• Unblocking remote task: Unblocking a different task using the Nanos6 blocking API

• Wait For: Blocking a deadline task, which will be re-enqueued when a certain amount of time has passed