A framework for adaptive collective communications for heterogeneous hierarchical computing systems

Collective communication operations are widely used in MPI applications and play an important role in their performance. However, the network heterogeneity inherent to grid environments represent a great challenge to develop efficient high performance computing applications. In this work we propose a generic framework based on communication models and adaptive techniques for dealing with collective communication patterns on grid platforms. Toward this goal, we address the hierarchical organization of the grid, selecting the most efficient communication algorithms at each network level. Our framework is also adaptive to grid load dynamics since it considers transient network characteristics for dividing the nodes into clusters. Our experiments with the broadcast operation on a real-grid setup indicate that an adaptive framework allows significant performance improvements on MPI collective communications

A Framework for Adaptive Collective Communications on Heterogeneous Hierarchical Networks

Extended version of the IPDPS 2006 paperToday, due to the wide variety of existing parallel systems consisting on collections of heterogeneous machines, it is very difficult for a user to solve a target problem by using a single algorithm or to write portable programs that perform well on multiple computational supports. The inherent heterogeneity and the diversity of networks of such environments represent a great challenge to model the communications for high performance computing applications. Our objective within this work is to propose a generic framework based on communication models and adaptive techniques for dealing with prediction of communication performances on cluster-based hierarchical platforms. Toward this goal, we introduce the concept of polyalgorithmic model of communications, which correspond to selection of the most adapted communication algorithms and scheduling strategies, giving the characteristics of the hardware resources of the target parallel system. We apply this methodology on collective communication operations and show that the framework provides significant performances while determining the best algorithm depending on the problem and architecture parameters

Towards adaptive multi-robot systems: self-organization and self-adaptation

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.The development of complex systems ensembles that operate in uncertain environments is a major challenge. The reason for this is that system designers are not able to fully specify the system during specification and development and before it is being deployed. Natural swarm systems enjoy similar characteristics, yet, being self-adaptive and being able to self-organize, these systems show beneficial emergent behaviour. Similar concepts can be extremely helpful for artificial systems, especially when it comes to multi-robot scenarios, which require such solution in order to be applicable to highly uncertain real world application. In this article, we present a comprehensive overview over state-of-the-art solutions in emergent systems, self-organization, self-adaptation, and robotics. We discuss these approaches in the light of a framework for multi-robot systems and identify similarities, differences missing links and open gaps that have to be addressed in order to make this framework possible

Advances in the Hierarchical Emergent Behaviors (HEB) approach to autonomous vehicles

Widespread deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs) presents formidable challenges in terms on handling scalability and complexity, particularly regarding vehicular reaction in the face of unforeseen corner cases. Hierarchical Emergent Behaviors (HEB) is a scalable architecture based on the concepts of emergent behaviors and hierarchical decomposition. It relies on a few simple but powerful rules to govern local vehicular interactions. Rather than requiring prescriptive programming of every possible scenario, HEB’s approach relies on global behaviors induced by the application of these local, well-understood rules. Our first two papers on HEB focused on a primal set of rules applied at the first hierarchical level. On the path to systematize a solid design methodology, this paper proposes additional rules for the second level, studies through simulations the resultant richer set of emergent behaviors, and discusses the communica-tion mechanisms between the different levels.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Emergent behaviors in the Internet of things: The ultimate ultra-large-scale system

To reach its potential, the Internet of Things (IoT) must break down the silos that limit applications' interoperability and hinder their manageability. Doing so leads to the building of ultra-large-scale systems (ULSS) in several areas, including autonomous vehicles, smart cities, and smart grids. The scope of ULSS is both large and complex. Thus, the authors propose Hierarchical Emergent Behaviors (HEB), a paradigm that builds on the concepts of emergent behavior and hierarchical organization. Rather than explicitly programming all possible decisions in the vast space of ULSS scenarios, HEB relies on the emergent behaviors induced by local rules at each level of the hierarchy. The authors discuss the modifications to classical IoT architectures required by HEB, as well as the new challenges. They also illustrate the HEB concepts in reference to autonomous vehicles. This use case paves the way to the discussion of new lines of research.Damian Roca work was supported by a Doctoral Scholarship provided by Fundación La Caixa. This work has been supported by the Spanish Government (Severo Ochoa grants SEV2015-0493) and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (contracts TIN2015-65316-P).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Optimization of MPI Collective Communication Operations

High-performance computing (HPC) systems keep growing in scale and heterogeneity to satisfy the increasing need for computation, and this brings new challenges to the design of Message Passing Interface (MPI) libraries, especially with regard to collective operations.The implementations of state-of-the-art MPI collective operations heavily rely on synchronizations, and these implementations magnify noise across the participating processes, resulting in significant performance slowdowns. Therefore, I create a new collective communication framework in Open MPI, using an event-driven design to relax synchronizations and maintain the minimal data dependencies of MPI collective operations.The recent growth in hardware heterogeneity results in increasingly complex hardware hierarchies and larger communication performance differences.Hence, in this dissertation, I present two approaches to perform hierarchical collective operations, and both can exploit the different bandwidths of hardware in heterogeneous systems and maximizing concurrent communications.Finally, to provide a fast and accurate autotuning mechanism for my framework, I design a new autotuning approach by combining two existing methods. This new approach significantly reduces the search space to save the autotuning time and is still able to provide accurate estimations.I evaluate my work with microbenchmarks and applications at different scales. Microbenchmark results show my work speedups MPI_Bcast and MPI_Allreduce up to 7.34X and 4.86X, respectively, on 4096 processes.In terms of applications, I achieve a 24.3% improvement for Hovorod and a 143% improvement for ASP on 1536 processes as compared to the current Open MPI