On Designing Multicore-aware Simulators for Biological Systems

The stochastic simulation of biological systems is an increasingly popular technique in bioinformatics. It often is an enlightening technique, which may however result in being computational expensive. We discuss the main opportunities to speed it up on multi-core platforms, which pose new challenges for parallelisation techniques. These opportunities are developed in two general families of solutions involving both the single simulation and a bulk of independent simulations (either replicas of derived from parameter sweep). Proposed solutions are tested on the parallelisation of the CWC simulator (Calculus of Wrapped Compartments) that is carried out according to proposed solutions by way of the FastFlow programming framework making possible fast development and efficient execution on multi-cores.Comment: 19 pages + cover pag

Challenging the abstraction penalty in parallel patterns libraries

In the last years, pattern-based programming has been recognized as a good practice for efficiently exploiting parallel hardware resources. Following this approach, multiple libraries have been designed for providing such high-level abstractions to ease the parallel programming. However, those libraries do not share a common interface. To pave the way, GrPPI has been designed for providing an intermediate abstraction layer between application developers and existing parallel programming frameworks like OpenMP, Intel TBB or ISO C++ threads. On the other hand, FastFlow has been adopted as an efficient object-based programming framework that may benefit from being supported as an additional GrPPI backend. However, the object-based approach presents some major challenges to be incorporated under the GrPPI type safe functional programming style. In this paper, we present the integration of FastFlow as a new GrPPI backend to demonstrate that structured parallel programming frameworks perfectly fit the GrPPI design. Additionally, we also demonstrate that GrPPI does not incur in additional overheads for providing its abstraction layer, and we study the programmability in terms of lines of code and cyclomatic complexity. In general, the presented work acts as reciprocal validation of both FastFlow (as an efficient, native structured parallel programming framework) and GrPPI (as an efficient abstraction layer on top of existing parallel programming frameworks).This work has been partially supported by the European Commission EU H2020-ICT-2014-1 Project RePhrase (No. 644235) and by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through TIN2016-79637-P “Towards Unification of HPC and Big Data Paradigms”

PiCo: a Novel Approach to Stream Data Analytics

In this paper, we present a new C++ API with a fluent interface called PiCo (Pipeline Composition). PiCo’s programming model aims at making easier the programming of data analytics applications while preserving or enhancing their performance. This is attained through three key design choices: 1) unifying batch and stream data access models, 2) decoupling processing from data layout, and 3) exploiting a stream-oriented, scalable, efficient C++11 runtime system. PiCo proposes a programming model based on pipelines and operators that are polymorphic with respect to data types in the sense that it is possible to re-use the same algorithms and pipelines on different data models (e.g., streams, lists, sets, etc.). Preliminary results show that PiCo can attain better performances in terms of execution times and hugely improve memory utilization when compared to Spark and Flink in both batch and stream processing.Author's copy (postprint) of C. Misale, M. Drocco, G. Tremblay, and M. Aldinucci, "PiCo: a Novel Approach to Stream Data Analytics," in Proc. of Euro-Par Workshops: 1st Intl. Workshop on Autonomic Solutions for Parallel and Distributed Data Stream Processing (Auto-DaSP 2017), Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 2018. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-75178-8_1

SPar: A DSL for High-Level and Productive Stream Parallelism

This paper introduces SPar, an internal C++ Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that supports the development of classic stream parallel applications. The DSL uses standard C++ attributes to introduce annotations tagging the notable components of stream parallel applications: stream sources and stream processing stages. A set of tools process SPar code (C++ annotated code using the SPar attributes) to generate FastFlow C++ code that exploits the stream parallelism denoted by SPar annotations while targeting shared memory multi-core architectures. We outline the main SPar features along with the main implementation techniques and tools. Also, we show the results of experiments assessing the feasibility of the entire approach as well as SPar's performance and expressiveness

10191 Abstracts Collection -- Program Composition and Optimization : Autotuning, Scheduling, Metaprogramming and Beyond

From May 9 to 12, 2010, the Dagstuhl Seminar 10191 ``Program Composition and Optimization: Autotuning, Scheduling, Metaprogramming and Beyond\u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

PiCo: A Domain-Specific Language for Data Analytics Pipelines

In the world of Big Data analytics, there is a series of tools aiming at simplifying programming applications to be executed on clusters. Although each tool claims to provide better programming, data and execution models—for which only informal (and often confusing) semantics is generally provided—all share a common under- lying model, namely, the Dataflow model. Using this model as a starting point, it is possible to categorize and analyze almost all aspects about Big Data analytics tools from a high level perspective. This analysis can be considered as a first step toward a formal model to be exploited in the design of a (new) framework for Big Data analytics. By putting clear separations between all levels of abstraction (i.e., from the runtime to the user API), it is easier for a programmer or software designer to avoid mixing low level with high level aspects, as we are often used to see in state-of-the-art Big Data analytics frameworks. From the user-level perspective, we think that a clearer and simple semantics is preferable, together with a strong separation of concerns. For this reason, we use the Dataflow model as a starting point to build a programming environment with a simplified programming model implemented as a Domain-Specific Language, that is on top of a stack of layers that build a prototypical framework for Big Data analytics. The contribution of this thesis is twofold: first, we show that the proposed model is (at least) as general as existing batch and streaming frameworks (e.g., Spark, Flink, Storm, Google Dataflow), thus making it easier to understand high-level data-processing applications written in such frameworks. As result of this analysis, we provide a layered model that can represent tools and applications following the Dataflow paradigm and we show how the analyzed tools fit in each level. Second, we propose a programming environment based on such layered model in the form of a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) for processing data collections, called PiCo (Pipeline Composition). The main entity of this programming model is the Pipeline, basically a DAG-composition of processing elements. This model is intended to give the user an unique interface for both stream and batch processing, hiding completely data management and focusing only on operations, which are represented by Pipeline stages. Our DSL will be built on top of the FastFlow library, exploiting both shared and distributed parallelism, and implemented in C++11/14 with the aim of porting C++ into the Big Data world

A Comparison of Big Data Frameworks on a Layered Dataflow Model

In the world of Big Data analytics, there is a series of tools aiming at simplifying programming applications to be executed on clusters. Although each tool claims to provide better programming, data and execution models, for which only informal (and often confusing) semantics is generally provided, all share a common underlying model, namely, the Dataflow model. The Dataflow model we propose shows how various tools share the same expressiveness at different levels of abstraction. The contribution of this work is twofold: first, we show that the proposed model is (at least) as general as existing batch and streaming frameworks (e.g., Spark, Flink, Storm), thus making it easier to understand high-level data-processing applications written in such frameworks. Second, we provide a layered model that can represent tools and applications following the Dataflow paradigm and we show how the analyzed tools fit in each level.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, In Proc. of the 9th Intl Symposium on High-Level Parallel Programming and Applications (HLPP), July 4-5 2016, Muenster, German

On Designing Multicore-Aware Simulators for Systems Biology Endowed with OnLine Statistics

The paper arguments are on enabling methodologies for the design of a fully parallel, online, interactive tool aiming to support the bioinformatics scientists .In particular, the features of these methodologies, supported by the FastFlow parallel programming framework, are shown on a simulation tool to perform the modeling, the tuning, and the sensitivity analysis of stochastic biological models. A stochastic simulation needs thousands of independent simulation trajectories turning into big data that should be analysed by statistic and data mining tools. In the considered approach the two stages are pipelined in such a way that the simulation stage streams out the partial results of all simulation trajectories to the analysis stage that immediately produces a partial result. The simulation-analysis workflow is validated for performance and effectiveness of the online analysis in capturing biological systems behavior on a multicore platform and representative proof-of-concept biological systems. The exploited methodologies include pattern-based parallel programming and data streaming that provide key features to the software designers such as performance portability and efficient in-memory (big) data management and movement. Two paradigmatic classes of biological systems exhibiting multistable and oscillatory behavior are used as a testbed