Status and Future Perspectives for Lattice Gauge Theory Calculations to the Exascale and Beyond

In this and a set of companion whitepapers, the USQCD Collaboration lays out a program of science and computing for lattice gauge theory. These whitepapers describe how calculation using lattice QCD (and other gauge theories) can aid the interpretation of ongoing and upcoming experiments in particle and nuclear physics, as well as inspire new ones.Comment: 44 pages. 1 of USQCD whitepapers

QR Factorization of Tall and Skinny Matrices in a Grid Computing Environment

Previous studies have reported that common dense linear algebra operations do not achieve speed up by using multiple geographical sites of a computational grid. Because such operations are the building blocks of most scientific applications, conventional supercomputers are still strongly predominant in high-performance computing and the use of grids for speeding up large-scale scientific problems is limited to applications exhibiting parallelism at a higher level. We have identified two performance bottlenecks in the distributed memory algorithms implemented in ScaLAPACK, a state-of-the-art dense linear algebra library. First, because ScaLAPACK assumes a homogeneous communication network, the implementations of ScaLAPACK algorithms lack locality in their communication pattern. Second, the number of messages sent in the ScaLAPACK algorithms is significantly greater than other algorithms that trade flops for communication. In this paper, we present a new approach for computing a QR factorization -- one of the main dense linear algebra kernels -- of tall and skinny matrices in a grid computing environment that overcomes these two bottlenecks. Our contribution is to articulate a recently proposed algorithm (Communication Avoiding QR) with a topology-aware middleware (QCG-OMPI) in order to confine intensive communications (ScaLAPACK calls) within the different geographical sites. An experimental study conducted on the Grid'5000 platform shows that the resulting performance increases linearly with the number of geographical sites on large-scale problems (and is in particular consistently higher than ScaLAPACK's).Comment: Accepted at IPDPS10. (IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium 2010 in Atlanta, GA, USA.

ELSI -- An open infrastructure for electronic structure solvers

Routine applications of electronic structure theory to molecules and periodic systems need to compute the electron density from given Hamiltonian and, in case of non-orthogonal basis sets, overlap matrices. System sizes can range from few to thousands or, in some examples, millions of atoms. Different discretization schemes (basis sets) and different system geometries (finite non-periodic vs. infinite periodic boundary conditions) yield matrices with different structures. The ELectronic Structure Infrastructure (ELSI) project provides an open-source software interface to facilitate the implementation and optimal use of high-performance solver libraries covering cubic scaling eigensolvers, linear scaling density-matrix-based algorithms, and other reduced scaling methods in between. In this paper, we present recent improvements and developments inside ELSI, mainly covering (1) new solvers connected to the interface, (2) matrix layout and communication adapted for parallel calculations of periodic and/or spin-polarized systems, (3) routines for density matrix extrapolation in geometry optimization and molecular dynamics calculations, and (4) general utilities such as parallel matrix I/O and JSON output. The ELSI interface has been integrated into four electronic structure code projects (DFTB+, DGDFT, FHI-aims, SIESTA), allowing us to rigorously benchmark the performance of the solvers on an equal footing. Based on results of a systematic set of large-scale benchmarks performed with Kohn–Sham density-functional theory and density-functional tight-binding theory, we identify factors that strongly affect the efficiency of the solvers, and propose a decision layer that assists with the solver selection process. Finally, we describe a reverse communication interface encoding matrix-free iterative solver strategies that are amenable, e.g., for use with planewave basis sets. Program summary: Program title: ELSI Interface CPC Library link to program files: http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/473mbbznrs.1 Licensing provisions: BSD 3-clause Programming language: Fortran 2003, with interface to C/C++ External routines/libraries: BLACS, BLAS, BSEPACK (optional), EigenExa (optional), ELPA, FortJSON, LAPACK, libOMM, MPI, MAGMA (optional), MUMPS (optional), NTPoly, ParMETIS (optional), PETSc (optional), PEXSI, PT-SCOTCH (optional), ScaLAPACK, SLEPc (optional), SuperLU_DIST Nature of problem: Solving the electronic structure from given Hamiltonian and overlap matrices in electronic structure calculations. Solution method: ELSI provides a unified software interface to facilitate the use of various electronic structure solvers including cubic scaling dense eigensolvers, linear scaling density matrix methods, and other approaches

Algorithms for Large Scale Problems in Eigenvalue and Svd Computations and in Big Data Applications

As ”big data” has increasing influence on our daily life and research activities, it poses significant challenges on various research areas. Some applications often demand a fast solution of large, sparse eigenvalue and singular value problems; In other applications, extracting knowledge from large-scale data requires many techniques such as statistical calculations, data mining, and high performance computing. In this dissertation, we develop efficient and robust iterative methods and software for the computation of eigenvalue and singular values. We also develop practical numerical and data mining techniques to estimate the trace of a function of a large, sparse matrix and to detect in real-time blob-filaments in fusion plasma on extremely large parallel computers. In the first work, we propose a hybrid two stage SVD method for efficiently and accurately computing a few extreme singular triplets, especially the ones corresponding to the smallest singular values. The first stage achieves fast convergence while the second achieves the final accuracy. Furthermore, we develop a high-performance preconditioned SVD software based on the proposed method on top of the state-of-the-art eigensolver PRIMME. The method can be used with or without preconditioning, on parallel computers, and is superior to other state-of-the-art SVD methods in both efficiency and robustness. In the second study, we provide insights and develop practical algorithms to accomplish efficient and accurate computation of interior eigenpairs using refined projection techniques in non-Krylov iterative methods. By analyzing different implementations of the refined projection, we propose a new hybrid method to efficiently find interior eigenpairs without compromising accuracy. Our numerical experiments illustrate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed method. In the third work, we present a novel method to estimate the trace of matrix inverse that exploits the pattern correlation between the diagonal of the inverse of the matrix and that of some approximate inverse. We leverage various sampling and fitting techniques to fit the diagonal of the approximation to that of the inverse. Our method may serve as a standalone kernel for providing a fast trace estimate or as a variance reduction method for Monte Carlo in some cases. An extensive set of experiments demonstrate the potential of our method. In the fourth study, we provide first results on applying outlier detection techniques to effectively tackle the fusion blob detection problem on extremely large parallel machines. We present a real-time region outlier detection algorithm to efficiently find and track blobs in fusion experiments and simulations. Our experiments demonstrated we can achieve linear time speedup up to 1024 MPI processes and complete blob detection in two or three milliseconds

Performance Modeling and Prediction for Dense Linear Algebra

This dissertation introduces measurement-based performance modeling and prediction techniques for dense linear algebra algorithms. As a core principle, these techniques avoid executions of such algorithms entirely, and instead predict their performance through runtime estimates for the underlying compute kernels. For a variety of operations, these predictions allow to quickly select the fastest algorithm configurations from available alternatives. We consider two scenarios that cover a wide range of computations: To predict the performance of blocked algorithms, we design algorithm-independent performance models for kernel operations that are generated automatically once per platform. For various matrix operations, instantaneous predictions based on such models both accurately identify the fastest algorithm, and select a near-optimal block size. For performance predictions of BLAS-based tensor contractions, we propose cache-aware micro-benchmarks that take advantage of the highly regular structure inherent to contraction algorithms. At merely a fraction of a contraction's runtime, predictions based on such micro-benchmarks identify the fastest combination of tensor traversal and compute kernel

Solving Large Dense Symmetric Eigenproblem on Hybrid Architectures

Dense symmetric eigenproblem is one of the most significant problems in the numerical linear algebra that arises in numerous research fields such as bioinformatics, computational chemistry, and meteorology. In the past years, the problems arising in these fields become bigger than ever resulting in growing demands in both computational power as well as the storage capacities. In such problems, the eigenproblem becomes the main computational bottleneck for which solution is required an extremely high computational power. Modern computing architectures that can meet these growing demands are those that combine the power of the traditional multi-core processors and the general-purpose GPUs and are called hybrid systems. These systems exhibit very high performance when the data fits into the GPU memory ; however, if the volume of the data exceeds the total GPU memory, i.e. the data is out-of-core from the GPU perspective, the performance rapidly decreases. This dissertation is focused on the development of the algorithms that solve dense symmetric eigenproblems on the hybrid GPU-based architectures. In particular, it aims at developing the eigensolvers that exhibit very high performance even if a problem is out- of-core for the GPU. The developed out-of-core eigensolvers are evaluated and compared on real problems that arise in the simulation of molecular motions. In such problems the data, usually too large to fit into the GPU memory, are stored in the main memory and copied to the GPU memory in pieces. That approach results in the performance drop due to a slow interconnection and a high memory latency. To overcome this problem an approach that applies blocking strategy and re- designs the existing eigensolvers, in order to decrease the volume of data transferred and the number of memory transfers, is presented. This approach designs and implements a set of the block- oriented, communication-avoiding BLAS routines that overlap the data transfers with the number of computations performed. Next, these routines are applied to speed-up the following eigensolvers: the solver based on the multi-stage reduction to a tridiagonal form, the Krylov subspace-based method, and the spectral divide-and-conquer method. Although the out-of-core BLAS routines significantly improve the performance of these three eigensolvers, a careful re-design is required in order to tackle the solution of the large eigenproblems on the hybrid CPU-GPU systems. In the out-of-core multi-stage reduction approach, the factor that mostly influences the performance is the band size of the obtained band matrix. On the other hand, the Krylov subspace- based method, although it is based on the memory- bound BLAS-2 operations, is the fastest method if only a small subset of the eigenpairs is required. Finally, the spectral divide-and- conquer algorithm, which exhibits significantly higher arithmetic cost than the other two eigensolvers, achieves extremely high performance since it can be performed completely in terms of the compute-bound BLAS-3 operations. Furthermore, its high arithmetic cost is further reduced by exploiting the special structure of a matrix. Finally, the results presented in the dissertation show that the three out-of-core eigen- solvers, for a set of the specific macromolecular problems, significantly overcome the multi-core variants and attain high flops rate even if data do not fit into the GPU memory. This proves that it is possible to solve large eigenproblems on modest computing systems equipped with a single GPU

Roadmap on Electronic Structure Codes in the Exascale Era

Electronic structure calculations have been instrumental in providing many important insights into a range of physical and chemical properties of various molecular and solid-state systems. Their importance to various fields, including materials science, chemical sciences, computational chemistry and device physics, is underscored by the large fraction of available public supercomputing resources devoted to these calculations. As we enter the exascale era, exciting new opportunities to increase simulation numbers, sizes, and accuracies present themselves. In order to realize these promises, the community of electronic structure software developers will however first have to tackle a number of challenges pertaining to the efficient use of new architectures that will rely heavily on massive parallelism and hardware accelerators. This roadmap provides a broad overview of the state-of-the-art in electronic structure calculations and of the various new directions being pursued by the community. It covers 14 electronic structure codes, presenting their current status, their development priorities over the next five years, and their plans towards tackling the challenges and leveraging the opportunities presented by the advent of exascale computing.Comment: Submitted as a roadmap article to Modelling and Simulation in Materials Science and Engineering; Address any correspondence to Vikram Gavini ([email protected]) and Danny Perez ([email protected]