862 research outputs found
Architecture-Aware Optimization on a 1600-core Graphics Processor
The graphics processing unit (GPU) continues to
make significant strides as an accelerator in commodity cluster
computing for high-performance computing (HPC). For example,
three of the top five fastest supercomputers in the world, as
ranked by the TOP500, employ GPUs as accelerators. Despite this
increasing interest in GPUs, however, optimizing the performance
of a GPU-accelerated compute node requires deep technical
knowledge of the underlying architecture. Although significant
literature exists on how to optimize GPU performance on the
more mature NVIDIA CUDA architecture, the converse is true
for OpenCL on the AMD GPU.
Consequently, we present and evaluate architecture-aware optimizations
for the AMD GPU. The most prominent optimizations
include (i) explicit use of registers, (ii) use of vector types, (iii)
removal of branches, and (iv) use of image memory for global data.
We demonstrate the efficacy of our AMD GPU optimizations by
applying each optimization in isolation as well as in concert to
a large-scale, molecular modeling application called GEM. Via
these AMD-specific GPU optimizations, the AMD Radeon HD
5870 GPU delivers 65% better performance than with the wellknown
NVIDIA-specific optimizations
Distributed-Memory Breadth-First Search on Massive Graphs
This chapter studies the problem of traversing large graphs using the
breadth-first search order on distributed-memory supercomputers. We consider
both the traditional level-synchronous top-down algorithm as well as the
recently discovered direction optimizing algorithm. We analyze the performance
and scalability trade-offs in using different local data structures such as CSR
and DCSC, enabling in-node multithreading, and graph decompositions such as 1D
and 2D decomposition.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1104.451
Ithemal: Accurate, Portable and Fast Basic Block Throughput Estimation using Deep Neural Networks
Predicting the number of clock cycles a processor takes to execute a block of
assembly instructions in steady state (the throughput) is important for both
compiler designers and performance engineers. Building an analytical model to
do so is especially complicated in modern x86-64 Complex Instruction Set
Computer (CISC) machines with sophisticated processor microarchitectures in
that it is tedious, error prone, and must be performed from scratch for each
processor generation. In this paper we present Ithemal, the first tool which
learns to predict the throughput of a set of instructions. Ithemal uses a
hierarchical LSTM--based approach to predict throughput based on the opcodes
and operands of instructions in a basic block. We show that Ithemal is more
accurate than state-of-the-art hand-written tools currently used in compiler
backends and static machine code analyzers. In particular, our model has less
than half the error of state-of-the-art analytical models (LLVM's llvm-mca and
Intel's IACA). Ithemal is also able to predict these throughput values just as
fast as the aforementioned tools, and is easily ported across a variety of
processor microarchitectures with minimal developer effort.Comment: Published at 36th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
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Multiple target task sharing support for the OpenMP accelerator model
The use of GPU accelerators is becoming common in HPC platforms due to the their effective performance and energy efficiency. In addition, new generations of multicore processors are being designed with wider vector units and/or larger hardware thread counts, also contributing to the peak performance of the whole system. Although current directive–based paradigms, such as OpenMP or OpenACC, support both accelerators and multicore-based hosts, they do not provide an effective
and efficient way to concurrently use them, usually resulting in accelerated programs in which the potential computational performance of the host is not exploited. In this paper we propose an extension to the OpenMP 4.5 directive-based programming model to support the specification and execution of multiple instances of task regions on different devices (i.e. accelerators in conjunction with the vector and heavily multithreaded capabilities in multicore processors). The compiler is responsible for the generation of device-specific code for each device kind, delegating to the runtime system the dynamic schedule of the tasks to the available devices. The new proposed clause conveys useful insight to guide the scheduler while keeping a clean, abstract and machine independent programmer interface. The potential of the proposal is analyzed in a prototype implementation in the OmpSs compiler and runtime infrastructure. Performance evaluation is done using three kernels (N-Body, tiled matrix multiply and Stream) on different GPU-capable systems based on ARM, Intel x86 and IBM Power8. From the evaluation we observe speed–ups in the 8–20% range compared to versions in which only the GPU is used, reaching 96 % of the additional peak performance thanks to the reduction of data transfers and the benefits introduced by the
OmpSs NUMA-aware scheduler.This work is partially supported by the IBM/BSC Deep Learning Center Initiative,
by the Spanish Government through Programa Severo Ochoa (SEV-2015-0493), by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology through TIN2015-65316-P project and by the Generalitat de Catalunya (contract 2014-SGR-1051).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
COLAB:A Collaborative Multi-factor Scheduler for Asymmetric Multicore Processors
Funding: Partially funded by the UK EPSRC grants Discovery: Pattern Discovery and Program Shaping for Many-core Systems (EP/P020631/1) and ABC: Adaptive Brokerage for Cloud (EP/R010528/1); Royal Academy of Engineering under the Research Fellowship scheme.Increasingly prevalent asymmetric multicore processors (AMP) are necessary for delivering performance in the era of limited power budget and dark silicon. However, the software fails to use them efficiently. OS schedulers, in particular, handle asymmetry only under restricted scenarios. We have efficient symmetric schedulers, efficient asymmetric schedulers for single-threaded workloads, and efficient asymmetric schedulers for single program workloads. What we do not have is a scheduler that can handle all runtime factors affecting AMP for multi-threaded multi-programmed workloads. This paper introduces the first general purpose asymmetry-aware scheduler for multi-threaded multi-programmed workloads. It estimates the performance of each thread on each type of core and identifies communication patterns and bottleneck threads. The scheduler then makes coordinated core assignment and thread selection decisions that still provide each application its fair share of the processor's time. We evaluate our approach using the GEM5 simulator on four distinct big.LITTLE configurations and 26 mixed workloads composed of PARSEC and SPLASH2 benchmarks. Compared to the state-of-the art Linux CFS and AMP-aware schedulers, we demonstrate performance gains of up to 25% and 5% to 15% on average depending on the hardware setup.Postprin
Programming MPSoC platforms: Road works ahead
This paper summarizes a special session on multicore/multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC) programming challenges. The current trend towards MPSoC platforms in most computing domains does not only mean a radical change in computer architecture. Even more important from a SW developer´s viewpoint, at the same time the classical sequential von Neumann programming model needs to be overcome. Efficient utilization of the MPSoC HW resources demands for radically new models and corresponding SW development tools, capable of exploiting the available parallelism and guaranteeing bug-free parallel SW. While several standards are established in the high-performance computing domain (e.g. OpenMP), it is clear that more innovations are required for successful\ud
deployment of heterogeneous embedded MPSoC. On the other hand, at least for coming years, the freedom for disruptive programming technologies is limited by the huge amount of certified sequential code that demands for a more pragmatic, gradual tool and code replacement strategy
Investigation of Parallel Data Processing Using Hybrid High Performance CPU + GPU Systems and CUDA Streams
The paper investigates parallel data processing in a hybrid CPU+GPU(s) system using multiple CUDA streams for overlapping communication and computations. This is crucial for efficient processing of data, in particular incoming data stream processing that would naturally be forwarded using multiple CUDA streams to GPUs. Performance is evaluated for various compute time to host-device communication time ratios, numbers of CUDA streams, for various numbers of threads managing computations on GPUs. Tests also reveal benefits of using CUDA MPS for overlapping communication and computations when using multiple processes. Furthermore, using standard memory allocation on a GPU and Unified Memory versions are compared, the latter including programmer added prefetching. Performance of a hybrid CPU+GPU version as well as scaling across multiple GPUs are demonstrated showing good speed-ups of the approach. Finally, the performance per power consumption of selected configurations are presented for various numbers of streams and various relative performances of GPUs and CPUs
RPPM : Rapid Performance Prediction of Multithreaded workloads on multicore processors
Analytical performance modeling is a useful complement to detailed cycle-level simulation to quickly explore the design space in an early design stage. Mechanistic analytical modeling is particularly interesting as it provides deep insight and does not require expensive offline profiling as empirical modeling. Previous work in mechanistic analytical modeling, unfortunately, is limited to single-threaded applications running on single-core processors.
This work proposes RPPM, a mechanistic analytical performance model for multi-threaded applications on multicore hardware. RPPM collects microarchitecture-independent characteristics of a multi-threaded workload to predict performance on a previously unseen multicore architecture. The profile needs to be collected only once to predict a range of processor architectures. We evaluate RPPM's accuracy against simulation and report a performance prediction error of 11.2% on average (23% max). We demonstrate RPPM's usefulness for conducting design space exploration experiments as well as for analyzing parallel application performance
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