1,937 research outputs found
Taking advantage of hybrid systems for sparse direct solvers via task-based runtimes
The ongoing hardware evolution exhibits an escalation in the number, as well
as in the heterogeneity, of computing resources. The pressure to maintain
reasonable levels of performance and portability forces application developers
to leave the traditional programming paradigms and explore alternative
solutions. PaStiX is a parallel sparse direct solver, based on a dynamic
scheduler for modern hierarchical manycore architectures. In this paper, we
study the benefits and limits of replacing the highly specialized internal
scheduler of the PaStiX solver with two generic runtime systems: PaRSEC and
StarPU. The tasks graph of the factorization step is made available to the two
runtimes, providing them the opportunity to process and optimize its traversal
in order to maximize the algorithm efficiency for the targeted hardware
platform. A comparative study of the performance of the PaStiX solver on top of
its native internal scheduler, PaRSEC, and StarPU frameworks, on different
execution environments, is performed. The analysis highlights that these
generic task-based runtimes achieve comparable results to the
application-optimized embedded scheduler on homogeneous platforms. Furthermore,
they are able to significantly speed up the solver on heterogeneous
environments by taking advantage of the accelerators while hiding the
complexity of their efficient manipulation from the programmer.Comment: Heterogeneity in Computing Workshop (2014
Pipelining the Fast Multipole Method over a Runtime System
Fast Multipole Methods (FMM) are a fundamental operation for the simulation
of many physical problems. The high performance design of such methods usually
requires to carefully tune the algorithm for both the targeted physics and the
hardware. In this paper, we propose a new approach that achieves high
performance across architectures. Our method consists of expressing the FMM
algorithm as a task flow and employing a state-of-the-art runtime system,
StarPU, in order to process the tasks on the different processing units. We
carefully design the task flow, the mathematical operators, their Central
Processing Unit (CPU) and Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) implementations, as
well as scheduling schemes. We compute potentials and forces of 200 million
particles in 48.7 seconds on a homogeneous 160 cores SGI Altix UV 100 and of 38
million particles in 13.34 seconds on a heterogeneous 12 cores Intel Nehalem
processor enhanced with 3 Nvidia M2090 Fermi GPUs.Comment: No. RR-7981 (2012
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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'
Scheduling data flow program in xkaapi: A new affinity based Algorithm for Heterogeneous Architectures
Efficient implementations of parallel applications on heterogeneous hybrid
architectures require a careful balance between computations and communications
with accelerator devices. Even if most of the communication time can be
overlapped by computations, it is essential to reduce the total volume of
communicated data. The literature therefore abounds with ad-hoc methods to
reach that balance, but that are architecture and application dependent. We
propose here a generic mechanism to automatically optimize the scheduling
between CPUs and GPUs, and compare two strategies within this mechanism: the
classical Heterogeneous Earliest Finish Time (HEFT) algorithm and our new,
parametrized, Distributed Affinity Dual Approximation algorithm (DADA), which
consists in grouping the tasks by affinity before running a fast dual
approximation. We ran experiments on a heterogeneous parallel machine with six
CPU cores and eight NVIDIA Fermi GPUs. Three standard dense linear algebra
kernels from the PLASMA library have been ported on top of the Xkaapi runtime.
We report their performances. It results that HEFT and DADA perform well for
various experimental conditions, but that DADA performs better for larger
systems and number of GPUs, and, in most cases, generates much lower data
transfers than HEFT to achieve the same performance
Sparse approximate inverse preconditioners on high performance GPU platforms
Simulation with models based on partial differential equations often requires the solution of (sequences of) large and sparse algebraic linear systems. In multidimensional domains, preconditioned Krylov iterative solvers are often appropriate for these duties. Therefore, the search for efficient preconditioners for Krylov subspace methods is a crucial theme. Recent developments, especially in computing hardware, have renewed the interest in approximate inverse preconditioners in factorized form, because their application during the solution process can be more efficient. We present here some experiences focused on the approximate inverse preconditioners proposed by Benzi and TĹŻma from 1996 and the sparsification and inversion proposed by van Duin in 1999. Computational costs, reorderings and implementation issues are considered both on conventional and innovative computing architectures like Graphics Programming Units (GPUs)
C Language Extensions for Hybrid CPU/GPU Programming with StarPU
Modern platforms used for high-performance computing (HPC) include machines
with both general-purpose CPUs, and "accelerators", often in the form of
graphical processing units (GPUs). StarPU is a C library to exploit such
platforms. It provides users with ways to define "tasks" to be executed on CPUs
or GPUs, along with the dependencies among them, and by automatically
scheduling them over all the available processing units. In doing so, it also
relieves programmers from the need to know the underlying architecture details:
it adapts to the available CPUs and GPUs, and automatically transfers data
between main memory and GPUs as needed. While StarPU's approach is successful
at addressing run-time scheduling issues, being a C library makes for a poor
and error-prone programming interface. This paper presents an effort started in
2011 to promote some of the concepts exported by the library as C language
constructs, by means of an extension of the GCC compiler suite. Our main
contribution is the design and implementation of language extensions that map
to StarPU's task programming paradigm. We argue that the proposed extensions
make it easier to get started with StarPU,eliminate errors that can occur when
using the C library, and help diagnose possible mistakes. We conclude on future
work
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