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Preparing sparse solvers for exascale computing.
Sparse solvers provide essential functionality for a wide variety of scientific applications. Highly parallel sparse solvers are essential for continuing advances in high-fidelity, multi-physics and multi-scale simulations, especially as we target exascale platforms. This paper describes the challenges, strategies and progress of the US Department of Energy Exascale Computing project towards providing sparse solvers for exascale computing platforms. We address the demands of systems with thousands of high-performance node devices where exposing concurrency, hiding latency and creating alternative algorithms become essential. The efforts described here are works in progress, highlighting current success and upcoming challenges. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Numerical algorithms for high-performance computational science'
Matrix-free GPU implementation of a preconditioned conjugate gradient solver for anisotropic elliptic PDEs
Many problems in geophysical and atmospheric modelling require the fast
solution of elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) in "flat" three
dimensional geometries. In particular, an anisotropic elliptic PDE for the
pressure correction has to be solved at every time step in the dynamical core
of many numerical weather prediction models, and equations of a very similar
structure arise in global ocean models, subsurface flow simulations and gas and
oil reservoir modelling. The elliptic solve is often the bottleneck of the
forecast, and an algorithmically optimal method has to be used and implemented
efficiently. Graphics Processing Units have been shown to be highly efficient
for a wide range of applications in scientific computing, and recently
iterative solvers have been parallelised on these architectures. We describe
the GPU implementation and optimisation of a Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient
(PCG) algorithm for the solution of a three dimensional anisotropic elliptic
PDE for the pressure correction in NWP. Our implementation exploits the strong
vertical anisotropy of the elliptic operator in the construction of a suitable
preconditioner. As the algorithm is memory bound, performance can be improved
significantly by reducing the amount of global memory access. We achieve this
by using a matrix-free implementation which does not require explicit storage
of the matrix and instead recalculates the local stencil. Global memory access
can also be reduced by rewriting the algorithm using loop fusion and we show
that this further reduces the runtime on the GPU. We demonstrate the
performance of our matrix-free GPU code by comparing it to a sequential CPU
implementation and to a matrix-explicit GPU code which uses existing libraries.
The absolute performance of the algorithm for different problem sizes is
quantified in terms of floating point throughput and global memory bandwidth.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figure
CSR5: An Efficient Storage Format for Cross-Platform Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication
Sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SpMV) is a fundamental building block
for numerous applications. In this paper, we propose CSR5 (Compressed Sparse
Row 5), a new storage format, which offers high-throughput SpMV on various
platforms including CPUs, GPUs and Xeon Phi. First, the CSR5 format is
insensitive to the sparsity structure of the input matrix. Thus the single
format can support an SpMV algorithm that is efficient both for regular
matrices and for irregular matrices. Furthermore, we show that the overhead of
the format conversion from the CSR to the CSR5 can be as low as the cost of a
few SpMV operations. We compare the CSR5-based SpMV algorithm with 11
state-of-the-art formats and algorithms on four mainstream processors using 14
regular and 10 irregular matrices as a benchmark suite. For the 14 regular
matrices in the suite, we achieve comparable or better performance over the
previous work. For the 10 irregular matrices, the CSR5 obtains average
performance improvement of 17.6\%, 28.5\%, 173.0\% and 293.3\% (up to 213.3\%,
153.6\%, 405.1\% and 943.3\%) over the best existing work on dual-socket Intel
CPUs, an nVidia GPU, an AMD GPU and an Intel Xeon Phi, respectively. For
real-world applications such as a solver with only tens of iterations, the CSR5
format can be more practical because of its low-overhead for format conversion.
The source code of this work is downloadable at
https://github.com/bhSPARSE/Benchmark_SpMV_using_CSR5Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures, In Proceedings of the 29th ACM International
Conference on Supercomputing (ICS '15
GraphBLAST: A High-Performance Linear Algebra-based Graph Framework on the GPU
High-performance implementations of graph algorithms are challenging to
implement on new parallel hardware such as GPUs because of three challenges:
(1) the difficulty of coming up with graph building blocks, (2) load imbalance
on parallel hardware, and (3) graph problems having low arithmetic intensity.
To address some of these challenges, GraphBLAS is an innovative, on-going
effort by the graph analytics community to propose building blocks based on
sparse linear algebra, which will allow graph algorithms to be expressed in a
performant, succinct, composable and portable manner. In this paper, we examine
the performance challenges of a linear-algebra-based approach to building graph
frameworks and describe new design principles for overcoming these bottlenecks.
Among the new design principles is exploiting input sparsity, which allows
users to write graph algorithms without specifying push and pull direction.
Exploiting output sparsity allows users to tell the backend which values of the
output in a single vectorized computation they do not want computed.
Load-balancing is an important feature for balancing work amongst parallel
workers. We describe the important load-balancing features for handling graphs
with different characteristics. The design principles described in this paper
have been implemented in "GraphBLAST", the first high-performance linear
algebra-based graph framework on NVIDIA GPUs that is open-source. The results
show that on a single GPU, GraphBLAST has on average at least an order of
magnitude speedup over previous GraphBLAS implementations SuiteSparse and GBTL,
comparable performance to the fastest GPU hardwired primitives and
shared-memory graph frameworks Ligra and Gunrock, and better performance than
any other GPU graph framework, while offering a simpler and more concise
programming model.Comment: 50 pages, 14 figures, 14 table
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