Enhancing the performance of malleable MPI applications by using performance-aware dynamic reconfiguration

The work in this paper focuses on providing malleability to MPI applications by using a novel performance-aware dynamic reconfiguration technique. This paper describes the design and implementation of Flex-MPI, an MPI library extension which can automatically monitor and predict the performance of applications, balance and redistribute the workload, and reconfigure the application at runtime by changing the number of processes. Unlike existent approaches, our reconfiguring policy is guided by user-defined performance criteria. We focus on iterative SPMD programs, a class of applications with critical mass within the scientific community. Extensive experiments show that Flex-MPI can improve the performance, parallel efficiency, and cost-efficiency of MPI programs with a minimal effort from the programmer.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the project TIN2013- 41350-P, Scalable Data Management Techniques for High-End Computing Systems, and EU under the COST Program Action IC1305, Network for Sustainable Ultrascale Computing (NESUS)Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Scheduling Dynamic OpenMP Applications over Multicore Architectures

International audienceApproaching the theoretical performance of hierarchical multicore machines requires a very careful distribution of threads and data among the underlying non-uniform architecture in order to minimize cache misses and NUMA penalties. While it is acknowledged that OpenMP can enhance the quality of thread scheduling on such architectures in a portable way, by transmitting precious information about the affinities between threads and data to the underlying runtime system, most OpenMP runtime systems are actually unable to efficiently support highly irregular, massively parallel applications on NUMA machines. In this paper, we present a thread scheduling policy suited to the execution of OpenMP programs featuring irregular and massive nested parallelism over hierarchical architectures. Our policy enforces a distribution of threads that maximizes the proximity of threads belonging to the same parallel section, and uses a NUMA-aware work stealing strategy when load balancing is needed. It has been developed as a plug-in to the ForestGOMP OpenMP platform. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach with a highly irregular recursive OpenMP program resulting from the generic parallelization of a surface reconstruction application. We achieve a speedup of 14 on a 16-core machine with no application-level optimization

On the use of biased-randomized algorithms for solving non-smooth optimization problems

Soft constraints are quite common in real-life applications. For example, in freight transportation, the fleet size can be enlarged by outsourcing part of the distribution service and some deliveries to customers can be postponed as well; in inventory management, it is possible to consider stock-outs generated by unexpected demands; and in manufacturing processes and project management, it is frequent that some deadlines cannot be met due to delays in critical steps of the supply chain. However, capacity-, size-, and time-related limitations are included in many optimization problems as hard constraints, while it would be usually more realistic to consider them as soft ones, i.e., they can be violated to some extent by incurring a penalty cost. Most of the times, this penalty cost will be nonlinear and even noncontinuous, which might transform the objective function into a non-smooth one. Despite its many practical applications, non-smooth optimization problems are quite challenging, especially when the underlying optimization problem is NP-hard in nature. In this paper, we propose the use of biased-randomized algorithms as an effective methodology to cope with NP-hard and non-smooth optimization problems in many practical applications. Biased-randomized algorithms extend constructive heuristics by introducing a nonuniform randomization pattern into them. Hence, they can be used to explore promising areas of the solution space without the limitations of gradient-based approaches, which assume the existence of smooth objective functions. Moreover, biased-randomized algorithms can be easily parallelized, thus employing short computing times while exploring a large number of promising regions. This paper discusses these concepts in detail, reviews existing work in different application areas, and highlights current trends and open research lines

Task-based Runtime Optimizations Towards High Performance Computing Applications

The last decades have witnessed a rapid improvement of computational capabilities in high-performance computing (HPC) platforms thanks to hardware technology scaling. HPC architectures benefit from mainstream advances on the hardware with many-core systems, deep hierarchical memory subsystem, non-uniform memory access, and an ever-increasing gap between computational power and memory bandwidth. This has necessitated continuous adaptations across the software stack to maintain high hardware utilization. In this HPC landscape of potentially million-way parallelism, task-based programming models associated with dynamic runtime systems are becoming more popular, which fosters developers’ productivity at extreme scale by abstracting the underlying hardware complexity. In this context, this dissertation highlights how a software bundle powered by a task-based programming model can address the heterogeneous workloads engendered by HPC applications., i.e., data redistribution, geospatial modeling and 3D unstructured mesh deformation here. Data redistribution aims to reshuffle data to optimize some objective for an algorithm, whose objective can be multi-dimensional, such as improving computational load balance or decreasing communication volume or cost, with the ultimate goal of increasing the efficiency and therefore reducing the time-to-solution for the algorithm. Geostatistical modeling, one of the prime motivating applications for exascale computing, is a technique for predicting desired quantities from geographically distributed data, based on statistical models and optimization of parameters. Meshing the deformable contour of moving 3D bodies is an expensive operation that can cause huge computational challenges in fluid-structure interaction (FSI) applications. Therefore, in this dissertation, Redistribute-PaRSEC, ExaGeoStat-PaRSEC and HiCMA-PaRSEC are proposed to efficiently tackle these HPC applications respectively at extreme scale, and they are evaluated on multiple HPC clusters, including AMD-based, Intel-based, Arm-based CPU systems and IBM-based multi-GPU system. This multidisciplinary work emphasizes the need for runtime systems to go beyond their primary responsibility of task scheduling on massively parallel hardware system for servicing the next-generation scientific applications

Supply chain management of blood products: a literature review.

This paper presents a review of the literature on inventory and supply chain management of blood products. First, we identify different perspectives on approaches to classifying the existing material. Each perspective is presented as a table in which the classification is displayed. The classification choices are exemplified through the citation of key references or by expounding the features of the perspective. The main contribution of this review is to facilitate the tracing of published work in relevant fields of interest, as well as identifying trends and indicating which areas should be subject to future research.OR in health services; Supply chain management; Inventory; Blood products; Literature review;

Performance-aware scheduling of parallel applications on non-dedicated clusters

This work presents a HPC framework that provides new strategies for resource management and job scheduling, based on executing different applications in shared compute nodes, maximizing platform utilization. The framework includes a scalable monitoring tool that is able to analyze the platform's compute node utilization. We also introduce an extension of CLARISSE, a middleware for data-staging coordination and control on large-scale HPC platforms that uses the information provided by the monitor in combination with application-level analysis to detect performance degradation in the running applications. This degradation, caused by the fact that the applications share the compute nodes and may compete for their resources, is avoided by means of dynamic application migration. A description of the architecture, as well as a practical evaluation of the proposal, shows significant performance improvements up to 20% in the makespan and 10% in energy consumption compared to a non-optimized execution.This work was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness under the grant TIN2016-79637-P "Towards Unification of HPC and Big Data Paradigms"; and the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant No. 801091, project "Exascale programming models for extreme data processing" (ASPIDE)