2,177 research outputs found
Improving the scalability of parallel N-body applications with an event driven constraint based execution model
The scalability and efficiency of graph applications are significantly
constrained by conventional systems and their supporting programming models.
Technology trends like multicore, manycore, and heterogeneous system
architectures are introducing further challenges and possibilities for emerging
application domains such as graph applications. This paper explores the space
of effective parallel execution of ephemeral graphs that are dynamically
generated using the Barnes-Hut algorithm to exemplify dynamic workloads. The
workloads are expressed using the semantics of an Exascale computing execution
model called ParalleX. For comparison, results using conventional execution
model semantics are also presented. We find improved load balancing during
runtime and automatic parallelism discovery improving efficiency using the
advanced semantics for Exascale computing.Comment: 11 figure
The force on the flex: Global parallelism and portability
A parallel programming methodology, called the force, supports the construction of programs to be executed in parallel by an unspecified, but potentially large, number of processes. The methodology was originally developed on a pipelined, shared memory multiprocessor, the Denelcor HEP, and embodies the primitive operations of the force in a set of macros which expand into multiprocessor Fortran code. A small set of primitives is sufficient to write large parallel programs, and the system has been used to produce 10,000 line programs in computational fluid dynamics. The level of complexity of the force primitives is intermediate. It is high enough to mask detailed architectural differences between multiprocessors but low enough to give the user control over performance. The system is being ported to a medium scale multiprocessor, the Flex/32, which is a 20 processor system with a mixture of shared and local memory. Memory organization and the type of processor synchronization supported by the hardware on the two machines lead to some differences in efficient implementations of the force primitives, but the user interface remains the same. An initial implementation was done by retargeting the macros to Flexible Computer Corporation's ConCurrent C language. Subsequently, the macros were caused to directly produce the system calls which form the basis for ConCurrent C. The implementation of the Fortran based system is in step with Flexible Computer Corporations's implementation of a Fortran system in the parallel environment
Parallel processing and expert systems
Whether it be monitoring the thermal subsystem of Space Station Freedom, or controlling the navigation of the autonomous rover on Mars, NASA missions in the 90's cannot enjoy an increased level of autonomy without the efficient use of expert systems. Merely increasing the computational speed of uniprocessors may not be able to guarantee that real time demands are met for large expert systems. Speed-up via parallel processing must be pursued alongside the optimization of sequential implementations. Prototypes of parallel expert systems have been built at universities and industrial labs in the U.S. and Japan. The state-of-the-art research in progress related to parallel execution of expert systems was surveyed. The survey is divided into three major sections: (1) multiprocessors for parallel expert systems; (2) parallel languages for symbolic computations; and (3) measurements of parallelism of expert system. Results to date indicate that the parallelism achieved for these systems is small. In order to obtain greater speed-ups, data parallelism and application parallelism must be exploited
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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'
Extending and Implementing the Self-adaptive Virtual Processor for Distributed Memory Architectures
Many-core architectures of the future are likely to have distributed memory
organizations and need fine grained concurrency management to be used
effectively. The Self-adaptive Virtual Processor (SVP) is an abstract
concurrent programming model which can provide this, but the model and its
current implementations assume a single address space shared memory. We
investigate and extend SVP to handle distributed environments, and discuss a
prototype SVP implementation which transparently supports execution on
heterogeneous distributed memory clusters over TCP/IP connections, while
retaining the original SVP programming model
A Comparative Analysis of STM Approaches to Reduction Operations in Irregular Applications
As a recently consolidated paradigm for optimistic concurrency in modern multicore architectures, Transactional Memory (TM)
can help to the exploitation of parallelism in irregular applications when data dependence information is not available up to run-
time. This paper presents and discusses how to leverage TM to exploit parallelism in an important class of irregular applications, the class that exhibits irregular reduction patterns. In order to test and compare our techniques with other solutions, they were implemented in a software TM system called ReduxSTM, that acts as a proof of concept. Basically, ReduxSTM combines two major ideas: a sequential-equivalent ordering of transaction commits that assures the correct result, and an extension of the underlying TM privatization mechanism to reduce unnecessary overhead due to reduction memory updates as well as unnecesary aborts and rollbacks. A comparative study of STM solutions, including ReduxSTM, and other more classical approaches to the parallelization of reduction operations is presented in terms of time, memory and overhead.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional AndalucÃa Tech
Gunrock: A High-Performance Graph Processing Library on the GPU
For large-scale graph analytics on the GPU, the irregularity of data access
and control flow, and the complexity of programming GPUs have been two
significant challenges for developing a programmable high-performance graph
library. "Gunrock", our graph-processing system designed specifically for the
GPU, uses a high-level, bulk-synchronous, data-centric abstraction focused on
operations on a vertex or edge frontier. Gunrock achieves a balance between
performance and expressiveness by coupling high performance GPU computing
primitives and optimization strategies with a high-level programming model that
allows programmers to quickly develop new graph primitives with small code size
and minimal GPU programming knowledge. We evaluate Gunrock on five key graph
primitives and show that Gunrock has on average at least an order of magnitude
speedup over Boost and PowerGraph, comparable performance to the fastest GPU
hardwired primitives, and better performance than any other GPU high-level
graph library.Comment: 14 pages, accepted by PPoPP'16 (removed the text repetition in the
previous version v5
The Glasgow Parallel Reduction Machine: Programming Shared-memory Many-core Systems using Parallel Task Composition
We present the Glasgow Parallel Reduction Machine (GPRM), a novel, flexible
framework for parallel task-composition based many-core programming. We allow
the programmer to structure programs into task code, written as C++ classes,
and communication code, written in a restricted subset of C++ with functional
semantics and parallel evaluation. In this paper we discuss the GPRM, the
virtual machine framework that enables the parallel task composition approach.
We focus the discussion on GPIR, the functional language used as the
intermediate representation of the bytecode running on the GPRM. Using examples
in this language we show the flexibility and power of our task composition
framework. We demonstrate the potential using an implementation of a merge sort
algorithm on a 64-core Tilera processor, as well as on a conventional Intel
quad-core processor and an AMD 48-core processor system. We also compare our
framework with OpenMP tasks in a parallel pointer chasing algorithm running on
the Tilera processor. Our results show that the GPRM programs outperform the
corresponding OpenMP codes on all test platforms, and can greatly facilitate
writing of parallel programs, in particular non-data parallel algorithms such
as reductions.Comment: In Proceedings PLACES 2013, arXiv:1312.221
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