Two Fundamental Concepts in Skeletal Parallel Programming

We define the concepts of nesting mode and interaction mode as they arise in the description of skeletal parallel programming systems. We sugegs

FastFlow tutorial

FastFlow is a structured parallel programming framework targeting shared memory multicores. Its layered design and the optimized implementation of the communication mechanisms used to implement the FastFlow streaming networks provided to the application programmer as algorithmic skeletons support the development of efficient fine grain parallel applications. FastFlow is available (open source) at SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/mc-fastflow/). This work introduces FastFlow programming techniques and points out the different ways used to parallelize existing C/C++ code using FastFlow as a software accelerator. In short: this is a kind of tutorial on FastFlow.Comment: 49 pages + cove

Algorithmic skeleton framework for the orchestration of GPU computations

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaThe Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is gaining popularity as a co-processor to the Central Processing Unit (CPU), due to its ability to surpass the latter’s performance in certain application fields. Nonetheless, harnessing the GPU’s capabilities is a non-trivial exercise that requires good knowledge of parallel programming. Thus, providing ways to extract such computational power has become an emerging research topic. In this context, there have been several proposals in the field of GPGPU (Generalpurpose Computation on Graphics Processing Unit) development. However, most of these still offer a low-level abstraction of the GPU computing model, forcing the developer to adapt application computations in accordance with the SPMD model, as well as to orchestrate the low-level details of the execution. On the other hand, the higher-level approaches have limitations that prevent the full exploitation of GPUs when the purpose goes beyond the simple offloading of a kernel. To this extent, our proposal builds on the recent trend of applying the notion of algorithmic patterns (skeletons) to GPU computing. We propose Marrow, a high-level algorithmic skeleton framework that expands the set of skeletons currently available in this field. Marrow’s skeletons orchestrate the execution of OpenCL computations and introduce optimizations that overlap communication and computation, thus conjoining programming simplicity with performance gains in many application scenarios. Additionally, these skeletons can be combined (nested) to create more complex applications. We evaluated the proposed constructs by confronting them against the comparable skeleton libraries for GPGPU, as well as against hand-tuned OpenCL programs. The results are favourable, indicating that Marrow’s skeletons are both flexible and efficient in the context of GPU computing.FCT-MCTES - financing the equipmen

Heterogeneous computing with an algorithmic skeleton framework

The Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is present in almost every modern day personal computer. Despite its specific purpose design, they have been increasingly used for general computations with very good results. Hence, there is a growing effort from the community to seamlessly integrate this kind of devices in everyday computing. However, to fully exploit the potential of a system comprising GPUs and CPUs, these devices should be presented to the programmer as a single platform. The efficient combination of the power of CPU and GPU devices is highly dependent on each device’s characteristics, resulting in platform specific applications that cannot be ported to different systems. Also, the most efficient work balance among devices is highly dependable on the computations to be performed and respective data sizes. In this work, we propose a solution for heterogeneous environments based on the abstraction level provided by algorithmic skeletons. Our goal is to take full advantage of the power of all CPU and GPU devices present in a system, without the need for different kernel implementations nor explicit work-distribution.To that end, we extended Marrow, an algorithmic skeleton framework for multi-GPUs, to support CPU computations and efficiently balance the work-load between devices. Our approach is based on an offline training execution that identifies the ideal work balance and platform configurations for a given application and input data size. The evaluation of this work shows that the combination of CPU and GPU devices can significantly boost the performance of our benchmarks in the tested environments, when compared to GPU-only executions

Multi-GPU support on the marrow algorithmic skeleton framework

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaWith the proliferation of general purpose GPUs, workload parallelization and datatransfer optimization became an increasing concern. The natural evolution from using a single GPU, is multiplying the amount of available processors, presenting new challenges, as tuning the workload decompositions and load balancing, when dealing with heterogeneous systems. Higher-level programming is a very important asset in a multi-GPU environment, due to the complexity inherent to the currently used GPGPU APIs (OpenCL and CUDA), because of their low-level and code overhead. This can be obtained by introducing an abstraction layer, which has the advantage of enabling implicit optimizations and orchestrations such as transparent load balancing mechanism and reduced explicit code overhead. Algorithmic Skeletons, previously used in cluster environments, have recently been adapted to the GPGPU context. Skeletons abstract most sources of code overhead, by defining computation patterns of commonly used algorithms. The Marrow algorithmic skeleton library is one of these, taking advantage of the abstractions to automate the orchestration needed for an efficient GPU execution. This thesis proposes the extension of Marrow to leverage the use of algorithmic skeletons in the modular and efficient programming of multiple heterogeneous GPUs, within a single machine. We were able to achieve a good balance between simplicity of the programming model and performance, obtaining good scalability when using multiple GPUs, with an efficient load distribution, although at the price of some overhead when using a single-GPU.projects PTDC/EIA-EIA/102579/2008 and PTDC/EIA-EIA/111518/200

Structured Parallelism by Composition - Design and implementation of a framework supporting skeleton compositionality

This thesis is dedicated to the efficient compositionality of algorithmic skeletons, which are abstractions of common parallel programming patterns. Skeletons can be implemented in the functional parallel language Eden as mere parallel higher order functions. The use of algorithmic skeletons facilitates parallel programming massively. This is because they already implement the tedious details of parallel programming and can be specialised for concrete applications by providing problem specific functions and parameters. Efficient skeleton compositionality is of particular importance because complex, specialised skeletons can be compound of simpler base skeletons. The resulting modularity is especially important for the context of functional programming and should not be missing in a functional language. We subdivide composition into three categories: -Nesting: A skeleton is instantiated from another skeleton instance. Communication is tree shaped, along the call hierarchy. This is directly supported by Eden. -Composition in sequence: The result of a skeleton is the input for a succeeding skeleton. Function composition is expressed in Eden by the ( . ) operator. For performance reasons the processes of both skeletons should be able to exchange results directly instead of using the indirection via the caller process. We therefore introduce the remote data concept. -Iteration: A skeleton is called in sequence a variable number of times. This can be defined using recursion and composition in sequence. We optimise the number of skeleton instances, the communication in between the iteration steps and the control of the loop. To this end, we developed an iteration framework where iteration skeletons are composed from control and body skeletons. Central to our composition concept is remote data. We send a remote data handle instead of ordinary data, the data handle is used at its destination to request the referenced data. Remote data can be used inside arbitrary container types for efficient skeleton composition similar to ordinary distributed data types. The free combinability of remote data with arbitrary container types leads to a high degree of flexibility. The programmer is not restricted by using a predefined set of distributed data types and (re-)distribution functions. Moreover, he can use remote data with arbitrary container types to elegantly create process topologies. For the special case of skeleton iteration we prevent the repeated construction and deconstruction of skeleton instances for each single iteration step, which is common for the recursive use of skeletons. This minimises the parallel overhead for process and channel creation and allows to keep data local on persistent processes. To this end we provide a skeleton framework. This concept is independent of remote data, however the use of remote data in combination with the iteration framework makes the framework more flexible. For our case studies, both approaches perform competitively compared to programs with identical parallel structure but which are implemented using monolithic skeletons - i.e. skeleton not composed from simpler ones. Further, we present extensions of Eden which enhance composition support: generalisation of overloaded communication, generalisation of process instantiation, compositional process placement and extensions of Box types used to adapt communication behaviour

Programming Heterogeneous Parallel Machines Using Refactoring and Monte-Carlo Tree Search

Funding: This work was supported by the EU Horizon 2020 project, TeamPlay, Grant Number 779882, and UK EPSRC Discovery, Grant Number EP/P020631/1.This paper presents a new technique for introducing and tuning parallelism for heterogeneous shared-memory systems (comprising a mixture of CPUs and GPUs), using a combination of algorithmic skeletons (such as farms and pipelines), Monte–Carlo tree search for deriving mappings of tasks to available hardware resources, and refactoring tool support for applying the patterns and mappings in an easy and effective way. Using our approach, we demonstrate easily obtainable, significant and scalable speedups on a number of case studies showing speedups of up to 41 over the sequential code on a 24-core machine with one GPU. We also demonstrate that the speedups obtained by mappings derived by the MCTS algorithm are within 5–15% of the best-obtained manual parallelisation.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe