Automatic Generation of Fast and Certified Code for Polynomial Evaluation

International audienceDesigning an efficient floating-point implementation of a function based on polynomial evaluation requires being able to find an accurate enough evaluation program, exploiting at most the target architecture features. This article introduces CGPE, a tool dealing with the generation of fast and certified codes for the evaluation of bivariate polynomials. First we discuss the issue underlying the evaluation scheme combinatorics before giving an overview of the CGPE tool. The approach we propose consists in two steps: the generation of evaluation schemes by using some heuristics so as to quickly find some of low latency; and the selection that mainly consists in automatically checking their scheduling on the given target and validating their accuracy. Then, we present on-going development and ideas for possible improvements of the whole process. Finally, we illustrate the use of CGPE on some examples, and show how it allows us to generate fast and certified codes in a few seconds and thus to reduce the development time of libms like FLIP

A survey of parallel execution strategies for transitive closure and logic programs

An important feature of database technology of the nineties is the use of parallelism for speeding up the execution of complex queries. This technology is being tested in several experimental database architectures and a few commercial systems for conventional select-project-join queries. In particular, hash-based fragmentation is used to distribute data to disks under the control of different processors in order to perform selections and joins in parallel. With the development of new query languages, and in particular with the definition of transitive closure queries and of more general logic programming queries, the new dimension of recursion has been added to query processing. Recursive queries are complex; at the same time, their regular structure is particularly suited for parallel execution, and parallelism may give a high efficiency gain. We survey the approaches to parallel execution of recursive queries that have been presented in the recent literature. We observe that research on parallel execution of recursive queries is separated into two distinct subareas, one focused on the transitive closure of Relational Algebra expressions, the other one focused on optimization of more general Datalog queries. Though the subareas seem radically different because of the approach and formalism used, they have many common features. This is not surprising, because most typical Datalog queries can be solved by means of the transitive closure of simple algebraic expressions. We first analyze the relationship between the transitive closure of expressions in Relational Algebra and Datalog programs. We then review sequential methods for evaluating transitive closure, distinguishing iterative and direct methods. We address the parallelization of these methods, by discussing various forms of parallelization. Data fragmentation plays an important role in obtaining parallel execution; we describe hash-based and semantic fragmentation. Finally, we consider Datalog queries, and present general methods for parallel rule execution; we recognize the similarities between these methods and the methods reviewed previously, when the former are applied to linear Datalog queries. We also provide a quantitative analysis that shows the impact of the initial data distribution on the performance of methods

Survey on Instruction Selection: An Extensive and Modern Literature Review

Instruction selection is one of three optimisation problems involved in the code generator backend of a compiler. The instruction selector is responsible of transforming an input program from its target-independent representation into a target-specific form by making best use of the available machine instructions. Hence instruction selection is a crucial part of efficient code generation. Despite on-going research since the late 1960s, the last, comprehensive survey on the field was written more than 30 years ago. As new approaches and techniques have appeared since its publication, this brings forth a need for a new, up-to-date review of the current body of literature. This report addresses that need by performing an extensive review and categorisation of existing research. The report therefore supersedes and extends the previous surveys, and also attempts to identify where future research should be directed.Comment: Major changes: - Merged simulation chapter with macro expansion chapter - Addressed misunderstandings of several approaches - Completely rewrote many parts of the chapters; strengthened the discussion of many approaches - Revised the drawing of all trees and graphs to put the root at the top instead of at the bottom - Added appendix for listing the approaches in a table See doc for more inf

A Design Framework for Efficient Distributed Analytics on Structured Big Data

Distributed analytics architectures are often comprised of two elements: a compute engine and a storage system. Conventional distributed storage systems usually store data in the form of files or key-value pairs. This abstraction simplifies how the data is accessed and reasoned about by an application developer. However, the separation of compute and storage systems makes it difficult to optimize costly disk and network operations. By design the storage system is isolated from the workload and its performance requirements such as block co-location and replication. Furthermore, optimizing fine-grained data access requests becomes difficult as the storage layer is hidden away behind such abstractions. Using a clean slate approach, this thesis proposes a modular distributed analytics system design which is centered around a unified interface for distributed data objects named the DDO. The interface couples key mechanisms that utilize storage, memory, and compute resources. This coupling makes it ideal to optimize data access requests across all memory hierarchy levels, with respect to the workload and its performance requirements. In addition to the DDO, a complementary DDO controller implementation controls the logical view of DDOs, their replication, and distribution across the cluster. A proof-of-concept implementation shows improvement in mean query time by 3-6x on the TPC-H and TPC-DS benchmarks, and more than an order of magnitude improvement in many cases

Dynamic Task Execution on Shared and Distributed Memory Architectures

Multicore architectures with high core counts have come to dominate the world of high performance computing, from shared memory machines to the largest distributed memory clusters. The multicore route to increased performance has a simpler design and better power efficiency than the traditional approach of increasing processor frequencies. But, standard programming techniques are not well adapted to this change in computer architecture design. In this work, we study the use of dynamic runtime environments executing data driven applications as a solution to programming multicore architectures. The goals of our runtime environments are productivity, scalability and performance. We demonstrate productivity by defining a simple programming interface to express code. Our runtime environments are experimentally shown to be scalable and give competitive performance on large multicore and distributed memory machines. This work is driven by linear algebra algorithms, where state-of-the-art libraries (e.g., LAPACK and ScaLAPACK) using a fork-join or block-synchronous execution style do not use the available resources in the most efficient manner. Research work in linear algebra has reformulated these algorithms as tasks acting on tiles of data, with data dependency relationships between the tasks. This results in a task-based DAG for the reformulated algorithms, which can be executed via asynchronous data-driven execution paths analogous to dataflow execution. We study an API and runtime environment for shared memory architectures that efficiently executes serially presented tile based algorithms. This runtime is used to enable linear algebra applications and is shown to deliver performance competitive with state-of- the-art commercial and research libraries. We develop a runtime environment for distributed memory multicore architectures extended from our shared memory implementation. The runtime takes serially presented algorithms designed for the shared memory environment, and schedules and executes them on distributed memory architectures in a scalable and high performance manner. We design a distributed data coherency protocol and a distributed task scheduling mechanism which avoid global coordination. Experimental results with linear algebra applications show the scalability and performance of our runtime environment

Modified-half-normal distribution and different methods to estimate average treatment effect.

This dissertation consists of three projects related to Modified-Half-Normal distribution and causal inference. In my first project, a new distribution called Modified-Half-Normal distribution was introduced. I explored a few of its distributional properties, the procedures for generating random samples based on Bayesian approaches, and the parameter estimation based on the method of moments. The second project deals with the problem of selection bias of average treatment effect (ATE) if we use the observational data. I combined the propensity score based inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) method and the directed acyclic graph (DAG) to solve this problem. The third project solves the problem of bias ATE using observational data by combining the doubly robust methods with the super learner algorithm

Scheduling and synchronization for multicore concurrency platforms

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 217-230).Developing correct and efficient parallel programs is difficult since programmers often have to manage low-level details like scheduling and synchronization explicitly. Recently, however, many hardware vendors have been shifting towards building multicore computers. This trend creates an enormous pressure to create concurrency platforms - platforms that provide an easier interface for parallel programming and enable ordinary programmers to write scalable, portable and efficient parallel programs. This thesis provides some provably-good practical solutions to problems that arise in the implementation of concurrency platforms, particularly in the domain of scheduling and synchronization. The first part of this thesis describes work on scheduling of parallel programs written in dynamic multithreaded languages (such as Cilk, Hood etc.). These languages allow the programmer to express parallelism of their code in a natural manner, while an automatic scheduler in the concurrency platform is responsible for scheduling the program on the underlying parallel hardware. This thesis presents designs to increase the functionality of these concurrency platforms. The second part of the thesis presents work on transactional memory semantics and design. Transactional memory (TM), has been recently proposed as an alternative to locks. TM provides a transactional interface to memory. The programmers can specify their critical sections inside a transaction, and the TM concurrency platform guarantees that the region executes atomically. One of the purported advantages of TM over locks is that transactional code is composable.(cont.) Most of the current TM concurrency platforms do not support full composability, however. This thesis addresses two of the composability problems in existing TM concurrency platforms.by Kunal Agrawal.Ph.D

Optimization and Management of Large-scale Scientific Workflows in Heterogeneous Network Environments: From Theory to Practice

Next-generation computation-intensive scientific applications feature large-scale computing workflows of various structures, which can be modeled as simple as linear pipelines or as complex as Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs). Supporting such computing workflows and optimizing their end-to-end network performance are crucial to the success of scientific collaborations that require fast system response, smooth data flow, and reliable distributed operation.We construct analytical cost models and formulate a class of workflow mapping problems with different mapping objectives and network constraints. The difficulty of these mapping problems essentially arises from the topological matching nature in the spatial domain, which is further compounded by the resource sharing complicacy in the temporal dimension. We provide detailed computational complexity analysis and design optimal or heuristic algorithms with rigorous correctness proof or performance analysis. We decentralize the proposed mapping algorithms and also investigate these optimization problems in unreliable network environments for fault tolerance.To examine and evaluate the performance of the workflow mapping algorithms before actual deployment and implementation, we implement a simulation program that simulates the execution dynamics of distributed computing workflows. We also develop a scientific workflow automation and management platform based on an existing workflow engine for experimentations in real environments. The performance superiority of the proposed mapping solutions are illustrated by extensive simulation-based comparisons with existing algorithms and further verified by large-scale experiments on real-life scientific workflow applications through effective system implementation and deployment in real networks