2,262 research outputs found
Julia: A Fresh Approach to Numerical Computing
Bridging cultures that have often been distant, Julia combines expertise from
the diverse fields of computer science and computational science to create a
new approach to numerical computing. Julia is designed to be easy and fast.
Julia questions notions generally held as "laws of nature" by practitioners of
numerical computing:
1. High-level dynamic programs have to be slow.
2. One must prototype in one language and then rewrite in another language
for speed or deployment, and
3. There are parts of a system for the programmer, and other parts best left
untouched as they are built by the experts.
We introduce the Julia programming language and its design --- a dance
between specialization and abstraction. Specialization allows for custom
treatment. Multiple dispatch, a technique from computer science, picks the
right algorithm for the right circumstance. Abstraction, what good computation
is really about, recognizes what remains the same after differences are
stripped away. Abstractions in mathematics are captured as code through another
technique from computer science, generic programming.
Julia shows that one can have machine performance without sacrificing human
convenience.Comment: 37 page
Performance and Optimization Abstractions for Large Scale Heterogeneous Systems in the Cactus/Chemora Framework
We describe a set of lower-level abstractions to improve performance on
modern large scale heterogeneous systems. These provide portable access to
system- and hardware-dependent features, automatically apply dynamic
optimizations at run time, and target stencil-based codes used in finite
differencing, finite volume, or block-structured adaptive mesh refinement
codes.
These abstractions include a novel data structure to manage refinement
information for block-structured adaptive mesh refinement, an iterator
mechanism to efficiently traverse multi-dimensional arrays in stencil-based
codes, and a portable API and implementation for explicit SIMD vectorization.
These abstractions can either be employed manually, or be targeted by
automated code generation, or be used via support libraries by compilers during
code generation. The implementations described below are available in the
Cactus framework, and are used e.g. in the Einstein Toolkit for relativistic
astrophysics simulations
Performance Evaluation of Sparse Matrix Multiplication Kernels on Intel Xeon Phi
Intel Xeon Phi is a recently released high-performance coprocessor which
features 61 cores each supporting 4 hardware threads with 512-bit wide SIMD
registers achieving a peak theoretical performance of 1Tflop/s in double
precision. Many scientific applications involve operations on large sparse
matrices such as linear solvers, eigensolver, and graph mining algorithms. The
core of most of these applications involves the multiplication of a large,
sparse matrix with a dense vector (SpMV). In this paper, we investigate the
performance of the Xeon Phi coprocessor for SpMV. We first provide a
comprehensive introduction to this new architecture and analyze its peak
performance with a number of micro benchmarks. Although the design of a Xeon
Phi core is not much different than those of the cores in modern processors,
its large number of cores and hyperthreading capability allow many application
to saturate the available memory bandwidth, which is not the case for many
cutting-edge processors. Yet, our performance studies show that it is the
memory latency not the bandwidth which creates a bottleneck for SpMV on this
architecture. Finally, our experiments show that Xeon Phi's sparse kernel
performance is very promising and even better than that of cutting-edge general
purpose processors and GPUs
Comparison of the MPP with other supercomputers for LANDSAT data processing
The massively parallel processor is compared to the CRAY X-MP and the CYBER-205 for LANDSAT data processing. The maximum likelihood classification algorithm is the basis for comparison since this algorithm is simple to implement and vectorizes very well. The algorithm was implemented on all three machines and tested by classifying the same full scene of LANDSAT multispectral scan data. Timings are compared as well as features of the machines and available software
Parallel and vector computation for stochastic optimal control applications
A general method for parallel and vector numerical solutions of stochastic dynamic programming problems is described for optimal control of general nonlinear, continuous time, multibody dynamical systems, perturbed by Poisson as well as Gaussian random white noise. Possible applications include lumped flight dynamics models for uncertain environments, such as large scale and background random atmospheric fluctuations. The numerical formulation is highly suitable for a vector multiprocessor or vectorizing supercomputer, and results exhibit high processor efficiency and numerical stability. Advanced computing techniques, data structures, and hardware help alleviate Bellman's curse of dimensionality in dynamic programming computations
A complete hand-drawn sketch vectorization framework
Vectorizing hand-drawn sketches is a challenging task, which is of paramount
importance for creating CAD vectorized versions for the fashion and creative
workflows. This paper proposes a complete framework that automatically
transforms noisy and complex hand-drawn sketches with different stroke types in
a precise, reliable and highly-simplified vectorized model. The proposed
framework includes a novel line extraction algorithm based on a
multi-resolution application of Pearson's cross correlation and a new unbiased
thinning algorithm that can get rid of scribbles and variable-width strokes to
obtain clean 1-pixel lines. Other contributions include variants of pruning,
merging and edge linking procedures to post-process the obtained paths.
Finally, a modification of the original Schneider's vectorization algorithm is
designed to obtain fewer control points in the resulting Bezier splines. All
the proposed steps of the framework have been extensively tested and compared
with state-of-the-art algorithms, showing (both qualitatively and
quantitatively) its outperformance
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