GHOST: Building blocks for high performance sparse linear algebra on heterogeneous systems

While many of the architectural details of future exascale-class high performance computer systems are still a matter of intense research, there appears to be a general consensus that they will be strongly heterogeneous, featuring "standard" as well as "accelerated" resources. Today, such resources are available as multicore processors, graphics processing units (GPUs), and other accelerators such as the Intel Xeon Phi. Any software infrastructure that claims usefulness for such environments must be able to meet their inherent challenges: massive multi-level parallelism, topology, asynchronicity, and abstraction. The "General, Hybrid, and Optimized Sparse Toolkit" (GHOST) is a collection of building blocks that targets algorithms dealing with sparse matrix representations on current and future large-scale systems. It implements the "MPI+X" paradigm, has a pure C interface, and provides hybrid-parallel numerical kernels, intelligent resource management, and truly heterogeneous parallelism for multicore CPUs, Nvidia GPUs, and the Intel Xeon Phi. We describe the details of its design with respect to the challenges posed by modern heterogeneous supercomputers and recent algorithmic developments. Implementation details which are indispensable for achieving high efficiency are pointed out and their necessity is justified by performance measurements or predictions based on performance models. The library code and several applications are available as open source. We also provide instructions on how to make use of GHOST in existing software packages, together with a case study which demonstrates the applicability and performance of GHOST as a component within a larger software stack.Comment: 32 pages, 11 figure

Format Abstraction for Sparse Tensor Algebra Compilers

This paper shows how to build a sparse tensor algebra compiler that is agnostic to tensor formats (data layouts). We develop an interface that describes formats in terms of their capabilities and properties, and show how to build a modular code generator where new formats can be added as plugins. We then describe six implementations of the interface that compose to form the dense, CSR/CSF, COO, DIA, ELL, and HASH tensor formats and countless variants thereof. With these implementations at hand, our code generator can generate code to compute any tensor algebra expression on any combination of the aforementioned formats. To demonstrate our technique, we have implemented it in the taco tensor algebra compiler. Our modular code generator design makes it simple to add support for new tensor formats, and the performance of the generated code is competitive with hand-optimized implementations. Furthermore, by extending taco to support a wider range of formats specialized for different application and data characteristics, we can improve end-user application performance. For example, if input data is provided in the COO format, our technique allows computing a single matrix-vector multiplication directly with the data in COO, which is up to 3.6$\times$ faster than by first converting the data to CSR.Comment: Presented at OOPSLA 201

GraphBLAST: A High-Performance Linear Algebra-based Graph Framework on the GPU

High-performance implementations of graph algorithms are challenging to implement on new parallel hardware such as GPUs because of three challenges: (1) the difficulty of coming up with graph building blocks, (2) load imbalance on parallel hardware, and (3) graph problems having low arithmetic intensity. To address some of these challenges, GraphBLAS is an innovative, on-going effort by the graph analytics community to propose building blocks based on sparse linear algebra, which will allow graph algorithms to be expressed in a performant, succinct, composable and portable manner. In this paper, we examine the performance challenges of a linear-algebra-based approach to building graph frameworks and describe new design principles for overcoming these bottlenecks. Among the new design principles is exploiting input sparsity, which allows users to write graph algorithms without specifying push and pull direction. Exploiting output sparsity allows users to tell the backend which values of the output in a single vectorized computation they do not want computed. Load-balancing is an important feature for balancing work amongst parallel workers. We describe the important load-balancing features for handling graphs with different characteristics. The design principles described in this paper have been implemented in "GraphBLAST", the first high-performance linear algebra-based graph framework on NVIDIA GPUs that is open-source. The results show that on a single GPU, GraphBLAST has on average at least an order of magnitude speedup over previous GraphBLAS implementations SuiteSparse and GBTL, comparable performance to the fastest GPU hardwired primitives and shared-memory graph frameworks Ligra and Gunrock, and better performance than any other GPU graph framework, while offering a simpler and more concise programming model.Comment: 50 pages, 14 figures, 14 table

Sympiler: Transforming Sparse Matrix Codes by Decoupling Symbolic Analysis

Sympiler is a domain-specific code generator that optimizes sparse matrix computations by decoupling the symbolic analysis phase from the numerical manipulation stage in sparse codes. The computation patterns in sparse numerical methods are guided by the input sparsity structure and the sparse algorithm itself. In many real-world simulations, the sparsity pattern changes little or not at all. Sympiler takes advantage of these properties to symbolically analyze sparse codes at compile-time and to apply inspector-guided transformations that enable applying low-level transformations to sparse codes. As a result, the Sympiler-generated code outperforms highly-optimized matrix factorization codes from commonly-used specialized libraries, obtaining average speedups over Eigen and CHOLMOD of 3.8X and 1.5X respectively.Comment: 12 page

Tiramisu: A Polyhedral Compiler for Expressing Fast and Portable Code

This paper introduces Tiramisu, a polyhedral framework designed to generate high performance code for multiple platforms including multicores, GPUs, and distributed machines. Tiramisu introduces a scheduling language with novel extensions to explicitly manage the complexities that arise when targeting these systems. The framework is designed for the areas of image processing, stencils, linear algebra and deep learning. Tiramisu has two main features: it relies on a flexible representation based on the polyhedral model and it has a rich scheduling language allowing fine-grained control of optimizations. Tiramisu uses a four-level intermediate representation that allows full separation between the algorithms, loop transformations, data layouts, and communication. This separation simplifies targeting multiple hardware architectures with the same algorithm. We evaluate Tiramisu by writing a set of image processing, deep learning, and linear algebra benchmarks and compare them with state-of-the-art compilers and hand-tuned libraries. We show that Tiramisu matches or outperforms existing compilers and libraries on different hardware architectures, including multicore CPUs, GPUs, and distributed machines.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1803.0041

Expression Templates Revisited: A Performance Analysis of the Current ET Methodology

In the last decade, Expression Templates (ET) have gained a reputation as an efficient performance optimization tool for C++ codes. This reputation builds on several ET-based linear algebra frameworks focused on combining both elegant and high-performance C++ code. However, on closer examination the assumption that ETs are a performance optimization technique cannot be maintained. In this paper we demonstrate and explain the inability of current ET-based frameworks to deliver high performance for dense and sparse linear algebra operations, and introduce a new "smart" ET implementation that truly allows the combination of high performance code with the elegance and maintainability of a domain-specific language.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figure

Preparing sparse solvers for exascale computing.

Sparse solvers provide essential functionality for a wide variety of scientific applications. Highly parallel sparse solvers are essential for continuing advances in high-fidelity, multi-physics and multi-scale simulations, especially as we target exascale platforms. This paper describes the challenges, strategies and progress of the US Department of Energy Exascale Computing project towards providing sparse solvers for exascale computing platforms. We address the demands of systems with thousands of high-performance node devices where exposing concurrency, hiding latency and creating alternative algorithms become essential. The efforts described here are works in progress, highlighting current success and upcoming challenges. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Numerical algorithms for high-performance computational science'