UPCBLAS : a numerical library for unified parallel C with architecture-aware optimizations

[Abstract] The popularity of Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages has increased during the last years thanks to their high programmability and performance through an efficient exploitation of data locality, especially on hierarchical architectures like multicore clusters. This PhD Thesis describes UPCBLAS, a parallel library for numerical computation using the PGAS Unified Parallel C (UPC) language. The routines are built on top of sequential BLAS and SparseBLAS functions and exploit the particularities of the PGAS paradigm, taking into account data locality in order to achieve a good performance. However, the growing complexity in computer system hierarchies due to the increase in the number of cores per processor, levels of cache (some of them shared) and the number of processors per node, as well as the high-speed interconnects, demands the use of new optimization techniques and libraries that take advantage of their features. For this reason, this Thesis also presents Servet, a suite of benchmarks focused on detecting a set of parameters with high in uence on the overall performance of multicore systems. UPCBLAS routines use the hardware parameters provided by Servet to implement optimization techniques that improve their performance. The performance of the library has been experimentally evaluated on several multicore supercomputers and compared to message-passing-based parallel numerical libraries, demonstrating good scalability and efficiency. UPCBLAS has also been used to develop more complex numerical codes in order to demonstrate that it is a good alternative to MPI-based libraries for increasing the productivity of numerical application developers

UPCBLAS: a library for parallel matrix computations in Unified Parallel C

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: González‐Domínguez, J. , Martín, M. J., Taboada, G. L., Touriño, J. , Doallo, R. , Mallón, D. A. and Wibecan, B. (2012), UPCBLAS: a library for parallel matrix computations in Unified Parallel C. Concurrency Computat.: Pract. Exper., 24: 1645-1667. doi:10.1002/cpe.1914, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1002/cpe.1914. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions.[Abstract] The popularity of Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages has increased during the last years thanks to their high programmability and performance through an efficient exploitation of data locality, especially on hierarchical architectures such as multicore clusters. This paper describes UPCBLAS, a parallel numerical library for dense matrix computations using the PGAS Unified Parallel C language. The routines developed in UPCBLAS are built on top of sequential basic linear algebra subprograms functions and exploit the particularities of the PGAS paradigm, taking into account data locality in order to achieve a good performance. Furthermore, the routines implement other optimization techniques, several of them by automatically taking into account the hardware characteristics of the underlying systems on which they are executed. The library has been experimentally evaluated on a multicore supercomputer and compared with a message‐passing‐based parallel numerical library, demonstrating good scalability and efficiency.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación; TIN2010-16735Ministerio de Educación; AP2008-0157

Performance Evaluation of Sparse Matrix Products in UPC

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in The Journal of Supercomputing. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-012-0796-4[Abstract] Unified Parallel C (UPC) is a Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) language whose popularity has increased during the last years owing to its high programmability and reasonable performance through an efficient exploitation of data locality, especially on hierarchical architectures like multicore clusters. However, the performance issues that arise in this language due to the irregular structure of sparse matrix operations have not yet been studied. Among them, the selection of an adequate storage format for the sparse matrices can significantly improve the efficiency of the parallel codes. This paper presents an evaluation, using UPC, of the most common sparse storage formats with different implementations of the matrix-vector and matrix-matrix products, which are key kernels in many scientific applications.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación; TIN2010-16735Ministerio de Educación; AP2008-01578Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación; CAPAP-H3; TIN2010-12011-

Evaluation of Distributed Programming Models and Extensions to Task-based Runtime Systems

High Performance Computing (HPC) has always been a key foundation for scientific simulation and discovery. And more recently, deep learning models\u27 training have further accelerated the demand of computational power and lower precision arithmetic. In this era following the end of Dennard\u27s Scaling and when Moore\u27s Law seemingly still holds true to a lesser extent, it is not a coincidence that HPC systems are equipped with multi-cores CPUs and a variety of hardware accelerators that are all massively parallel. Coupling this with interconnect networks\u27 speed improvements lagging behind those of computational power increases, the current state of HPC systems is heterogeneous and extremely complex. This was heralded as a great challenge to the software stacks and their ability to extract performance from these systems, but also as a great opportunity to innovate at the programming model level to explore the different approaches and propose new solutions. With usability, portability, and performance as the main factors to consider, this dissertation first evaluates some of the widely used parallel programming models (MPI, MPI+OpenMP, and task-based runtime systems) ability to manage the load imbalance among the processes computing the LU factorization of a large dense matrix stored in the Block Low-Rank (BLR) format. Next I proposed a number of optimizations and implemented them in PaRSEC\u27s Dynamic Task Discovery (DTD) model, including user-level graph trimming and direct Application Programming Interface (API) calls to perform data broadcast operation to further extend the limit of STF model. On the other hand, the Parameterized Task Graph (PTG) approach in PaRSEC is the most scalable approach for many different applications, which I then explored the possibility of combining both the algorithmic approach of Communication-Avoiding (CA) and the communication-computation overlapping benefits provided by runtime systems using 2D five-point stencil as the test case. This broad programming models evaluation and extension work highlighted the abilities of task-based runtime system in achieving scalable performance and portability on contemporary heterogeneous HPC systems. Finally, I summarized the profiling capability of PaRSEC runtime system, and demonstrated with a use case its important role in the performance bottleneck identification leading to optimizations

Parallel computing 2011, ParCo 2011: book of abstracts

This book contains the abstracts of the presentations at the conference Parallel Computing 2011, 30 August - 2 September 2011, Ghent, Belgiu

Effective data parallel computing on multicore processors

The rise of chip multiprocessing or the integration of multiple general purpose processing cores on a single chip (multicores), has impacted all computing platforms including high performance, servers, desktops, mobile, and embedded processors. Programmers can no longer expect continued increases in software performance without developing parallel, memory hierarchy friendly software that can effectively exploit the chip level multiprocessing paradigm of multicores. The goal of this dissertation is to demonstrate a design process for data parallel problems that starts with a sequential algorithm and ends with a high performance implementation on a multicore platform. Our design process combines theoretical algorithm analysis with practical optimization techniques. Our target multicores are quad-core processors from Intel and the eight-SPE IBM Cell B.E. Target applications include Matrix Multiplications (MM), Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD), LU Decomposition (LUD), and Power Flow Solver based on Gauss-Seidel (PFS-GS) algorithms. These applications are popular computation methods in science and engineering problems and are characterized by unit-stride (MM, LUD, and PFS-GS) or 2-point stencil (FDTD) memory access pattern. The main contributions of this dissertation include a cache- and space-efficient algorithm model, integrated data pre-fetching and caching strategies, and in-core optimization techniques. Our multicore efficient implementations of the above described applications outperform nai¨ve parallel implementations by at least 2x and scales well with problem size and with the number of processing cores

Architecture--Performance Interrelationship Analysis In Single/Multiple Cpu/Gpu Computing Systems: Application To Composite Process Flow Modeling

Current developments in computing have shown the advantage of using one or more Graphic Processing Units (GPU) to boost the performance of many computationally intensive applications but there are still limits to these GPU-enhanced systems. The major factors that contribute to the limitations of GPU(s) for High Performance Computing (HPC) can be categorized as hardware and software oriented in nature. Understanding how these factors affect performance is essential to develop efficient and robust applications codes that employ one or more GPU devices as powerful co-processors for HPC computational modeling. The present work analyzes and understands the intrinsic interrelationship of both hardware and software categories on computational performance for single and multiple GPU-enhanced systems using a computationally intensive application that is representative of a large portion of challenges confronting modern HPC. The representative application uses unstructured finite element computations for transient composite resin infusion process flow modeling as the computational core, characteristics and results of which reflect many other HPC applications via the sparse matrix system used for the solution of linear system of equations. This work describes these various software and hardware factors and how they interact to affect performance of computationally intensive applications enabling more efficient development and porting of High Performance Computing applications that includes current, legacy, and future large scale computational modeling applications in various engineering and scientific disciplines