99,886 research outputs found
An Efficient Multiway Mergesort for GPU Architectures
Sorting is a primitive operation that is a building block for countless
algorithms. As such, it is important to design sorting algorithms that approach
peak performance on a range of hardware architectures. Graphics Processing
Units (GPUs) are particularly attractive architectures as they provides massive
parallelism and computing power. However, the intricacies of their compute and
memory hierarchies make designing GPU-efficient algorithms challenging. In this
work we present GPU Multiway Mergesort (MMS), a new GPU-efficient multiway
mergesort algorithm. MMS employs a new partitioning technique that exposes the
parallelism needed by modern GPU architectures. To the best of our knowledge,
MMS is the first sorting algorithm for the GPU that is asymptotically optimal
in terms of global memory accesses and that is completely free of shared memory
bank conflicts.
We realize an initial implementation of MMS, evaluate its performance on
three modern GPU architectures, and compare it to competitive implementations
available in state-of-the-art GPU libraries. Despite these implementations
being highly optimized, MMS compares favorably, achieving performance
improvements for most random inputs. Furthermore, unlike MMS, state-of-the-art
algorithms are susceptible to bank conflicts. We find that for certain inputs
that cause these algorithms to incur large numbers of bank conflicts, MMS can
achieve up to a 37.6% speedup over its fastest competitor. Overall, even though
its current implementation is not fully optimized, due to its efficient use of
the memory hierarchy, MMS outperforms the fastest comparison-based sorting
implementations available to date
Speculative Approximations for Terascale Analytics
Model calibration is a major challenge faced by the plethora of statistical
analytics packages that are increasingly used in Big Data applications.
Identifying the optimal model parameters is a time-consuming process that has
to be executed from scratch for every dataset/model combination even by
experienced data scientists. We argue that the incapacity to evaluate multiple
parameter configurations simultaneously and the lack of support to quickly
identify sub-optimal configurations are the principal causes. In this paper, we
develop two database-inspired techniques for efficient model calibration.
Speculative parameter testing applies advanced parallel multi-query processing
methods to evaluate several configurations concurrently. The number of
configurations is determined adaptively at runtime, while the configurations
themselves are extracted from a distribution that is continuously learned
following a Bayesian process. Online aggregation is applied to identify
sub-optimal configurations early in the processing by incrementally sampling
the training dataset and estimating the objective function corresponding to
each configuration. We design concurrent online aggregation estimators and
define halting conditions to accurately and timely stop the execution. We apply
the proposed techniques to distributed gradient descent optimization -- batch
and incremental -- for support vector machines and logistic regression models.
We implement the resulting solutions in GLADE PF-OLA -- a state-of-the-art Big
Data analytics system -- and evaluate their performance over terascale-size
synthetic and real datasets. The results confirm that as many as 32
configurations can be evaluated concurrently almost as fast as one, while
sub-optimal configurations are detected accurately in as little as a
fraction of the time
Fast Multi-Scale Community Detection based on Local Criteria within a Multi-Threaded Algorithm
Many systems can be described using graphs, or networks. Detecting
communities in these networks can provide information about the underlying
structure and functioning of the original systems. Yet this detection is a
complex task and a large amount of work was dedicated to it in the past decade.
One important feature is that communities can be found at several scales, or
levels of resolution, indicating several levels of organisations. Therefore
solutions to the community structure may not be unique. Also networks tend to
be large and hence require efficient processing. In this work, we present a new
algorithm for the fast detection of communities across scales using a local
criterion. We exploit the local aspect of the criterion to enable parallel
computation and improve the algorithm's efficiency further. The algorithm is
tested against large generated multi-scale networks and experiments demonstrate
its efficiency and accuracy.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1204.100
Exploiting partial reconfiguration through PCIe for a microphone array network emulator
The current Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) technology enables the deployment of relatively low-cost wireless sensor networks composed of MEMS microphone arrays for accurate sound source localization. However, the evaluation and the selection of the most accurate and power-efficient network’s topology are not trivial when considering dynamic MEMS microphone arrays. Although software simulators are usually considered, they consist of high-computational intensive tasks, which require hours to days to be completed. In this paper, we present an FPGA-based platform to emulate a network of microphone arrays. Our platform provides a controlled simulated acoustic environment, able to evaluate the impact of different network configurations such as the number of microphones per array, the network’s topology, or the used detection method. Data fusion techniques, combining the data collected by each node, are used in this platform. The platform is designed to exploit the FPGA’s partial reconfiguration feature to increase the flexibility of the network emulator as well as to increase performance thanks to the use of the PCI-express high-bandwidth interface. On the one hand, the network emulator presents a higher flexibility by partially reconfiguring the nodes’ architecture in runtime. On the other hand, a set of strategies and heuristics to properly use partial reconfiguration allows the acceleration of the emulation by exploiting the execution parallelism. Several experiments are presented to demonstrate some of the capabilities of our platform and the benefits of using partial reconfiguration
- …