2,276 research outputs found
Towards an Adaptive Skeleton Framework for Performance Portability
The proliferation of widely available, but very different, parallel architectures
makes the ability to deliver good parallel performance
on a range of architectures, or performance portability, highly desirable.
Irregularly-parallel problems, where the number and size
of tasks is unpredictable, are particularly challenging and require
dynamic coordination.
The paper outlines a novel approach to delivering portable parallel
performance for irregularly parallel programs. The approach
combines declarative parallelism with JIT technology, dynamic
scheduling, and dynamic transformation.
We present the design of an adaptive skeleton library, with a task
graph implementation, JIT trace costing, and adaptive transformations.
We outline the architecture of the protoype adaptive skeleton
execution framework in Pycket, describing tasks, serialisation,
and the current scheduler.We report a preliminary evaluation of the
prototype framework using 4 micro-benchmarks and a small case
study on two NUMA servers (24 and 96 cores) and a small cluster
(17 hosts, 272 cores). Key results include Pycket delivering good
sequential performance e.g. almost as fast as C for some benchmarks;
good absolute speedups on all architectures (up to 120 on
128 cores for sumEuler); and that the adaptive transformations do
improve performance
CSR5: An Efficient Storage Format for Cross-Platform Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication
Sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SpMV) is a fundamental building block
for numerous applications. In this paper, we propose CSR5 (Compressed Sparse
Row 5), a new storage format, which offers high-throughput SpMV on various
platforms including CPUs, GPUs and Xeon Phi. First, the CSR5 format is
insensitive to the sparsity structure of the input matrix. Thus the single
format can support an SpMV algorithm that is efficient both for regular
matrices and for irregular matrices. Furthermore, we show that the overhead of
the format conversion from the CSR to the CSR5 can be as low as the cost of a
few SpMV operations. We compare the CSR5-based SpMV algorithm with 11
state-of-the-art formats and algorithms on four mainstream processors using 14
regular and 10 irregular matrices as a benchmark suite. For the 14 regular
matrices in the suite, we achieve comparable or better performance over the
previous work. For the 10 irregular matrices, the CSR5 obtains average
performance improvement of 17.6\%, 28.5\%, 173.0\% and 293.3\% (up to 213.3\%,
153.6\%, 405.1\% and 943.3\%) over the best existing work on dual-socket Intel
CPUs, an nVidia GPU, an AMD GPU and an Intel Xeon Phi, respectively. For
real-world applications such as a solver with only tens of iterations, the CSR5
format can be more practical because of its low-overhead for format conversion.
The source code of this work is downloadable at
https://github.com/bhSPARSE/Benchmark_SpMV_using_CSR5Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures, In Proceedings of the 29th ACM International
Conference on Supercomputing (ICS '15
Delta Networks for Optimized Recurrent Network Computation
Many neural networks exhibit stability in their activation patterns over time
in response to inputs from sensors operating under real-world conditions. By
capitalizing on this property of natural signals, we propose a Recurrent Neural
Network (RNN) architecture called a delta network in which each neuron
transmits its value only when the change in its activation exceeds a threshold.
The execution of RNNs as delta networks is attractive because their states must
be stored and fetched at every timestep, unlike in convolutional neural
networks (CNNs). We show that a naive run-time delta network implementation
offers modest improvements on the number of memory accesses and computes, but
optimized training techniques confer higher accuracy at higher speedup. With
these optimizations, we demonstrate a 9X reduction in cost with negligible loss
of accuracy for the TIDIGITS audio digit recognition benchmark. Similarly, on
the large Wall Street Journal speech recognition benchmark even existing
networks can be greatly accelerated as delta networks, and a 5.7x improvement
with negligible loss of accuracy can be obtained through training. Finally, on
an end-to-end CNN trained for steering angle prediction in a driving dataset,
the RNN cost can be reduced by a substantial 100X
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