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'

Taking advantage of hybrid systems for sparse direct solvers via task-based runtimes

The ongoing hardware evolution exhibits an escalation in the number, as well as in the heterogeneity, of computing resources. The pressure to maintain reasonable levels of performance and portability forces application developers to leave the traditional programming paradigms and explore alternative solutions. PaStiX is a parallel sparse direct solver, based on a dynamic scheduler for modern hierarchical manycore architectures. In this paper, we study the benefits and limits of replacing the highly specialized internal scheduler of the PaStiX solver with two generic runtime systems: PaRSEC and StarPU. The tasks graph of the factorization step is made available to the two runtimes, providing them the opportunity to process and optimize its traversal in order to maximize the algorithm efficiency for the targeted hardware platform. A comparative study of the performance of the PaStiX solver on top of its native internal scheduler, PaRSEC, and StarPU frameworks, on different execution environments, is performed. The analysis highlights that these generic task-based runtimes achieve comparable results to the application-optimized embedded scheduler on homogeneous platforms. Furthermore, they are able to significantly speed up the solver on heterogeneous environments by taking advantage of the accelerators while hiding the complexity of their efficient manipulation from the programmer.Comment: Heterogeneity in Computing Workshop (2014

Lecture 13: A low-rank factorization framework for building scalable algebraic solvers and preconditioners

Factorization based preconditioning algorithms, most notably incomplete LU (ILU) factorization, have been shown to be robust and applicable to wide ranges of problems. However, traditional ILU algorithms are not amenable to scalable implementation. In recent years, we have seen a lot of investigations using low-rank compression techniques to build approximate factorizations.A key to achieving lower complexity is the use of hierarchical matrix algebra, stemming from the H-matrix research. In addition, the multilevel algorithm paradigm provides a good vehicle for a scalable implementation. The goal of this lecture is to give an overview of the various hierarchical matrix formats, such as hierarchically semi-separable matrix (HSS), hierarchically off-diagonal low-rank matrix (HODLR) and Butterfly matrix, and explain the algorithm differences and approximation quality. We will illustrate many practical issues of these algorithms using our parallel libraries STRUMPACK and ButterflyPACK, and demonstrate their effectiveness and scalability while solving the very challenging problems, such as high frequency wave equations

Lecture 13: A low-rank factorization framework for building scalable algebraic solvers and preconditioners

Factorization based preconditioning algorithms, most notably incomplete LU (ILU) factorization, have been shown to be robust and applicable to wide ranges of problems. However, traditional ILU algorithms are not amenable to scalable implementation. In recent years, we have seen a lot of investigations using low-rank compression techniques to build approximate factorizations.A key to achieving lower complexity is the use of hierarchical matrix algebra, stemming from the H-matrix research. In addition, the multilevel algorithm paradigm provides a good vehicle for a scalable implementation. The goal of this lecture is to give an overview of the various hierarchical matrix formats, such as hierarchically semi-separable matrix (HSS), hierarchically off-diagonal low-rank matrix (HODLR) and Butterfly matrix, and explain the algorithm differences and approximation quality. We will illustrate many practical issues of these algorithms using our parallel libraries STRUMPACK and ButterflyPACK, and demonstrate their effectiveness and scalability while solving the very challenging problems, such as high frequency wave equations

Evaluation of Distributed Programming Models and Extensions to Task-based Runtime Systems

High Performance Computing (HPC) has always been a key foundation for scientific simulation and discovery. And more recently, deep learning models\u27 training have further accelerated the demand of computational power and lower precision arithmetic. In this era following the end of Dennard\u27s Scaling and when Moore\u27s Law seemingly still holds true to a lesser extent, it is not a coincidence that HPC systems are equipped with multi-cores CPUs and a variety of hardware accelerators that are all massively parallel. Coupling this with interconnect networks\u27 speed improvements lagging behind those of computational power increases, the current state of HPC systems is heterogeneous and extremely complex. This was heralded as a great challenge to the software stacks and their ability to extract performance from these systems, but also as a great opportunity to innovate at the programming model level to explore the different approaches and propose new solutions. With usability, portability, and performance as the main factors to consider, this dissertation first evaluates some of the widely used parallel programming models (MPI, MPI+OpenMP, and task-based runtime systems) ability to manage the load imbalance among the processes computing the LU factorization of a large dense matrix stored in the Block Low-Rank (BLR) format. Next I proposed a number of optimizations and implemented them in PaRSEC\u27s Dynamic Task Discovery (DTD) model, including user-level graph trimming and direct Application Programming Interface (API) calls to perform data broadcast operation to further extend the limit of STF model. On the other hand, the Parameterized Task Graph (PTG) approach in PaRSEC is the most scalable approach for many different applications, which I then explored the possibility of combining both the algorithmic approach of Communication-Avoiding (CA) and the communication-computation overlapping benefits provided by runtime systems using 2D five-point stencil as the test case. This broad programming models evaluation and extension work highlighted the abilities of task-based runtime system in achieving scalable performance and portability on contemporary heterogeneous HPC systems. Finally, I summarized the profiling capability of PaRSEC runtime system, and demonstrated with a use case its important role in the performance bottleneck identification leading to optimizations

An Experimental Study of Two-Level Schwarz Domain Decomposition Preconditioners on GPUs

The generalized Dryja--Smith--Widlund (GDSW) preconditioner is a two-level overlapping Schwarz domain decomposition (DD) preconditioner that couples a classical one-level overlapping Schwarz preconditioner with an energy-minimizing coarse space. When used to accelerate the convergence rate of Krylov subspace iterative methods, the GDSW preconditioner provides robustness and scalability for the solution of sparse linear systems arising from the discretization of a wide range of partial different equations. In this paper, we present FROSch (Fast and Robust Schwarz), a domain decomposition solver package which implements GDSW-type preconditioners for both CPU and GPU clusters. To improve the solver performance on GPUs, we use a novel decomposition to run multiple MPI processes on each GPU, reducing both solver's computational and storage costs and potentially improving the convergence rate. This allowed us to obtain competitive or faster performance using GPUs compared to using CPUs alone. We demonstrate the performance of FROSch on the Summit supercomputer with NVIDIA V100 GPUs, where we used NVIDIA Multi-Process Service (MPS) to implement our decomposition strategy. The solver has a wide variety of algorithmic and implementation choices, which poses both opportunities and challenges for its GPU implementation. We conduct a thorough experimental study with different solver options including the exact or inexact solution of the local overlapping subdomain problems on a GPU. We also discuss the effect of using the iterative variant of the incomplete LU factorization and sparse-triangular solve as the approximate local solver, and using lower precision for computing the whole FROSch preconditioner. Overall, the solve time was reduced by factors of about $2\times$ using GPUs, while the GPU acceleration of the numerical setup time depend on the solver options and the local matrix sizes.Comment: Accepted for publication in IPDPS'2

Recursion based parallelization of exact dense linear algebra routines for Gaussian elimination

International audienceWe present block algorithms and their implementation for the parallelization of sub-cubic Gaussian elimination on shared memory architectures.Contrarily to the classical cubic algorithms in parallel numerical linear algebra, we focus here on recursive algorithms and coarse grain parallelization.Indeed, sub-cubic matrix arithmetic can only be achieved through recursive algorithms making coarse grain block algorithms perform more efficiently than fine grain ones. This work is motivated by the design and implementation of dense linear algebraover a finite field, where fast matrix multiplication is used extensively and where costly modular reductions also advocate for coarse grain block decomposition. We incrementally build efficient kernels, for matrix multiplication first, then triangular system solving, on top of which a recursive PLUQ decomposition algorithm is built. We study the parallelization of these kernels using several algorithmic variants: either iterative or recursive and using different splitting strategies. Experiments show that recursive adaptive methods for matrix multiplication, hybrid recursive-iterative methods for triangular system solve and tile recursive versions of the PLUQ decomposition, together with various data mapping policies, provide the best performance on a 32 cores NUMA architecture. Overall, we show that the overhead of modular reductions is more than compensated by the fast linear algebra algorithms and that exact dense linear algebra matches the performance of full rank reference numerical software even in the presence of rank deficiencies

Modeling 1D distributed-memory dense kernels for an asynchronous multifrontal sparse solver

To solve sparse systems of linear equations, multifrontal methods rely on dense partial LU decompositions of so-called frontal matrices; we consider a parallel asynchronous setting in which several frontal matrices can be factored simultaneously. In this context, to address performance and scalability issues of acyclic pipelined asynchronous factorization kernels, we study models to revisit properties of left and right-looking variants of partial $LU$ decompositions, study the use of several levels of blocking, before focusing on communication issues. The general purpose sparse solver MUMPS has been modified to implement the proposed algorithms and confirm the properties demonstrated by the models

Scalable Domain Decomposition Preconditioners for Heterogeneous Elliptic Problems

International audienceDomain decomposition methods are, alongside multigrid methods, one of the dominant paradigms in contemporary large-scale partial differential equation simulation. In this paper, a lightweight implementation of a theoretically and numerically scalable preconditioner is presented in the context of overlapping methods. The performance of this work is assessed by numerical simulations executed on thousands of cores, for solving various highly heterogeneous elliptic problems in both 2D and 3D with billions of degrees of freedom. Such problems arise in computational science and engineering, in solid and fluid mechanics. While focusing on overlapping domain decomposition methods might seem too restrictive, it will be shown how this work can be applied to a variety of other methods, such as non-overlapping methods and abstract deflation based preconditioners. It is also presented how multilevel preconditioners can be used to avoid communication during an iterative process such as a Krylov method