1,355 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
A Class of Parallel Tiled Linear Algebra Algorithms for Multicore Architectures
As multicore systems continue to gain ground in the High Performance
Computing world, linear algebra algorithms have to be reformulated or new
algorithms have to be developed in order to take advantage of the architectural
features on these new processors. Fine grain parallelism becomes a major
requirement and introduces the necessity of loose synchronization in the
parallel execution of an operation. This paper presents an algorithm for the
Cholesky, LU and QR factorization where the operations can be represented as a
sequence of small tasks that operate on square blocks of data. These tasks can
be dynamically scheduled for execution based on the dependencies among them and
on the availability of computational resources. This may result in an out of
order execution of the tasks which will completely hide the presence of
intrinsically sequential tasks in the factorization. Performance comparisons
are presented with the LAPACK algorithms where parallelism can only be
exploited at the level of the BLAS operations and vendor implementations
Rectangular Full Packed Format for Cholesky's Algorithm: Factorization, Solution and Inversion
We describe a new data format for storing triangular, symmetric, and
Hermitian matrices called RFPF (Rectangular Full Packed Format). The standard
two dimensional arrays of Fortran and C (also known as full format) that are
used to represent triangular and symmetric matrices waste nearly half of the
storage space but provide high performance via the use of Level 3 BLAS.
Standard packed format arrays fully utilize storage (array space) but provide
low performance as there is no Level 3 packed BLAS. We combine the good
features of packed and full storage using RFPF to obtain high performance via
using Level 3 BLAS as RFPF is a standard full format representation. Also, RFPF
requires exactly the same minimal storage as packed format. Each LAPACK full
and/or packed triangular, symmetric, and Hermitian routine becomes a single new
RFPF routine based on eight possible data layouts of RFPF. This new RFPF
routine usually consists of two calls to the corresponding LAPACK full format
routine and two calls to Level 3 BLAS routines. This means {\it no} new
software is required. As examples, we present LAPACK routines for Cholesky
factorization, Cholesky solution and Cholesky inverse computation in RFPF to
illustrate this new work and to describe its performance on several commonly
used computer platforms. Performance of LAPACK full routines using RFPF versus
LAPACK full routines using standard format for both serial and SMP parallel
processing is about the same while using half the storage. Performance gains
are roughly one to a factor of 43 for serial and one to a factor of 97 for SMP
parallel times faster using vendor LAPACK full routines with RFPF than with
using vendor and/or reference packed routines
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