Evaluating Performance of OpenMP Tasks in a Seismic Stencil Application.

Simulations based on stencil computations (widely used in geosciences) have been dominated by the MPI+OpenMP programming model paradigm. Little effort has been devoted to experimenting with task-based parallelism in this context. We address this by introducing OpenMP task parallelism into the kernel of an industrial seismic modeling code, Minimod. We observe that even for these highly regular stencil computations, taskified kernels are competitive with traditional OpenMP-augmented loops, and in some experiments tasks even outperform loop parallelism.