Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationDataflow pipeline models are widely used in visualization systems. Despite recent advancements in parallel architecture, most systems still support only a single CPU or a small collection of CPUs such as a SMP workstation. Even for systems that are specifically tuned towards parallel visualization, their execution models only provide support for data-parallelism while ignoring taskparallelism and pipeline-parallelism. With the recent popularization of machines equipped with multicore CPUs and multi-GPU units, these visualization systems are undoubtedly falling further behind in reaching maximum efficiency. On the other hand, there exist several libraries that can schedule program executions on multiple CPUs and/or multiple GPUs. However, due to differences in executing a task graph and a pipeline along with their APIs being considerably low-level, it still remains a challenge to integrate these run-time libraries into current visualization systems. Thus, there is a need for a redesigned dataflow architecture to fully support and exploit the power of highly parallel machines in large-scale visualization. The new design must be able to schedule executions on heterogeneous platforms while at the same time supporting arbitrarily large datasets through the use of streaming data structures. The primary goal of this dissertation work is to develop a parallel dataflow architecture for streaming large-scale visualizations. The framework includes supports for platforms ranging from multicore processors to clusters consisting of thousands CPUs and GPUs. We achieve this in our system by introducing the notion of Virtual Processing Elements and Task-Oriented Modules along with a highly customizable scheduler that controls the assignment of tasks to elements dynamically. This creates an intuitive way to maintain multiple CPU/GPU kernels yet still provide coherency and synchronization across module executions. We have implemented these techniques into HyperFlow which is made of an API with all basic dataflow constructs described in the dissertation, and a distributed run-time library that can be used to deploy those pipelines on multicore, multi-GPU and cluster-based platforms

Architecture--Performance Interrelationship Analysis In Single/Multiple Cpu/Gpu Computing Systems: Application To Composite Process Flow Modeling

Current developments in computing have shown the advantage of using one or more Graphic Processing Units (GPU) to boost the performance of many computationally intensive applications but there are still limits to these GPU-enhanced systems. The major factors that contribute to the limitations of GPU(s) for High Performance Computing (HPC) can be categorized as hardware and software oriented in nature. Understanding how these factors affect performance is essential to develop efficient and robust applications codes that employ one or more GPU devices as powerful co-processors for HPC computational modeling. The present work analyzes and understands the intrinsic interrelationship of both hardware and software categories on computational performance for single and multiple GPU-enhanced systems using a computationally intensive application that is representative of a large portion of challenges confronting modern HPC. The representative application uses unstructured finite element computations for transient composite resin infusion process flow modeling as the computational core, characteristics and results of which reflect many other HPC applications via the sparse matrix system used for the solution of linear system of equations. This work describes these various software and hardware factors and how they interact to affect performance of computationally intensive applications enabling more efficient development and porting of High Performance Computing applications that includes current, legacy, and future large scale computational modeling applications in various engineering and scientific disciplines

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationPartial differential equations (PDEs) are widely used in science and engineering to model phenomena such as sound, heat, and electrostatics. In many practical science and engineering applications, the solutions of PDEs require the tessellation of computational domains into unstructured meshes and entail computationally expensive and time-consuming processes. Therefore, efficient and fast PDE solving techniques on unstructured meshes are important in these applications. Relative to CPUs, the faster growth curves in the speed and greater power efficiency of the SIMD streaming processors, such as GPUs, have gained them an increasingly important role in the high-performance computing area. Combining suitable parallel algorithms and these streaming processors, we can develop very efficient numerical solvers of PDEs. The contributions of this dissertation are twofold: proposal of two general strategies to design efficient PDE solvers on GPUs and the specific applications of these strategies to solve different types of PDEs. Specifically, this dissertation consists of four parts. First, we describe the general strategies, the domain decomposition strategy and the hybrid gathering strategy. Next, we introduce a parallel algorithm for solving the eikonal equation on fully unstructured meshes efficiently. Third, we present the algorithms and data structures necessary to move the entire FEM pipeline to the GPU. Fourth, we propose a parallel algorithm for solving the levelset equation on fully unstructured 2D or 3D meshes or manifolds. This algorithm combines a narrowband scheme with domain decomposition for efficient levelset equation solving

Achieving High Speed CFD simulations: Optimization, Parallelization, and FPGA Acceleration for the unstructured DLR TAU Code

Today, large scale parallel simulations are fundamental tools to handle complex problems. The number of processors in current computation platforms has been recently increased and therefore it is necessary to optimize the application performance and to enhance the scalability of massively-parallel systems. In addition, new heterogeneous architectures, combining conventional processors with specific hardware, like FPGAs, to accelerate the most time consuming functions are considered as a strong alternative to boost the performance. In this paper, the performance of the DLR TAU code is analyzed and optimized. The improvement of the code efficiency is addressed through three key activities: Optimization, parallelization and hardware acceleration. At first, a profiling analysis of the most time-consuming processes of the Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes flow solver on a three-dimensional unstructured mesh is performed. Then, a study of the code scalability with new partitioning algorithms are tested to show the most suitable partitioning algorithms for the selected applications. Finally, a feasibility study on the application of FPGAs and GPUs for the hardware acceleration of CFD simulations is presented

High performance scientific computing in applications with direct finite element simulation

xiii, 133 p.La predicción del flujo separado, incluida la pérdida de un avión completo mediantela dinámica de fluidos computacional (CFD) se considera uno de los grandes desaf¿¿os que seresolverán en 2030, según NASA. Las ecuaciones no lineales de Navier-Stokes proporcionan laformulación matemática para flujo de fluidos en espacios tridimensionales. Sin embargo, todaviafaltan soluciones clásicas, existencia y singularidad. Ya que el cálculo de la fuerza bruta esintratable para realizar simulación predictiva para un avión completo, uno puede usar la simulaciónnumérica directa (DNS); sin embargo, prohibitivamente caro ya que necesita resolver laturbulencia a escala de magnitud Re power (9/4). Considerando otros métodos como el estad¿¿sticopromedio Reynolds¿s Average Navier Stokes (RANS), spatial average Large Eddy Simulation(LES), y Hybrid Detached Eddy Simulation (DES), que requieren menos cantidad de grados delibertad. Todos estos métodos deben ajustarse a los problemas de referencia y, además, cerca las paredes, la malla tieneque ser muy fina para resolver las capas l¿¿mite (lo cual significa que el costo computacional es muycostoso). Por encima de todo, los resultados son sensibles a, por ejemplo, parámetros expl¿¿citos enel método, la malla, etc.Como una solución al desaf¿¿o, aqu¿¿ presentamos la adaptación Metodolog¿¿a de solución directa deFEM (DFS) con resolución numérica disparo, como una familia predictiva, libre de parámetros demétodos para flujo turbulento. Resolvimos el modelo de avión JAXA Standard Model (JSM) ennúmero realista de Reynolds, presentado como parte del High Lift Taller de predicción 3.Predijimos un aumento de Cl dentro de un error de 5 % vs experimento, arrastre Cd dentro de 10 %error y detenga 1 ¿ dentro del ángulo de ataque.El taller identificó un probable experimento error depedido 10 % para los resultados de arrastre. La simulación es 10 veces más rápido y más barato encomparación con CFD tradicional o existente enfoques. La eficiencia proviene principalmente dell¿¿mite de deslizamiento condición que permite mallas gruesas cerca de las paredes, orientada aobjetivos control de error adaptativo que refina la malla solo donde es necesario y grandes pasos detiempo utilizando un método de iteración de punto fijo tipo Schur, sin comprometer la precisión delos resultados de la simulación.También presentamos una generalización de DFS a densidad variable y validado contra el problemade referencia MARIN bien establecido. los Los resultados muestran un buen acuerdo con losresultados experimentales en forma de sensores de presión. Más tarde, usamos esta metodolog¿¿apara resolver dos aplicaciones en problemas de flujo multifásico. Uno tiene que ver con un flashtanque de almacenamiento de agua de lluvia (consorcio de agua de Bilbao), y el segundo es sobre eldiseño de una boquilla para impresión 3D. En el agua de lluvia tanque de almacenamiento,predijimos que la altura del agua en el tanque tiene un influencia significativa sobre cómo secomporta el flujo aguas abajo de la puerta del tanque (válvula). Para la impresión 3D,desarrollamos un diseño eficiente con El flujo de chorro enfocado para evitar la oxidación y elcalentamiento en la punta del boquilla durante un proceso de fusión.Finalmente, presentamos aqu¿¿ el paralelismo en múltiples GPU y el incrustado sistema dearquitectura Kalray. Casi todas las supercomputadoras de hoy tienen arquitecturas heterogéneas,1 See the UNESCO Internacional Standard nomenclature for fields of Science and Technologyacomo CPU+GPU u otros aceleradores, y, por lo tanto, es esencial desarrollar marcoscomputacionales para aprovecha de ellos. Como lo hemos visto antes, se comienza a desarrollar eseCFD más tarde en la década de 1060 cuando podemos tener poder computacional, por lo tanto, Esesencial utilizar y probar estos aceleradores para los cálculos de CFD. Las GPU tienen unaarquitectura diferente en comparación con las CPU tradicionales. Técnicamente, la GPU tienemuchos núcleos en comparación con las CPU que hacen de la GPU una buena opción para elcómputo paralelo.Para múltiples GPU, desarrollamos un cálculo de plantilla, aplicado a simulación depliegues geológicos. Exploramos la computación de halo y utilizamos Secuencias CUDA paraoptimizar el tiempo de computación y comunicación. La ganancia de rendimiento resultante fue de23 % para cuatro GPU con arquitectura Fermi, y la mejora correspondiente obtenida en cuatro LasGPU Kepler fueron de 47 %.This research was carried out at the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics (BCAM) within the CFD Computational Technology (CFDCT) and also at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science(Royal Institue of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden). Which is suported by Fundacion Obra Social “la Caixa“, Severo Ochoa Excellence research centre 2014-2018 SEV-2013-0323, Severo Ochoa Excellence research centre 2018-2022 SEV-2017-0718, BERC program 2014-2017, BERC program 2018-2021, MSO4SC European project, Elkartek. This work has been performed using the computing infrastructure from SNIC (Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing)

High Performance Scientific Computing in Applications with Direct Finite Element Simulation

To predict separated flow including stall of a full aircraft with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is considered one of the problems of the grand challenges to be solved by 2030, according to NASA [1]. The nonlinear Navier- Stokes equations provide the mathematical formulation for fluid flow in 3- dimensional spaces. However, classical solutions, existence, and uniqueness are still missing. Since brute-force computation is intractable, to perform predictive simulation for a full aircraft, one can use Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS); however, it is prohibitively expensive as it needs to resolve the turbulent scales of order Re4 . Considering other methods such as statistical average Reynolds’s Average Navier Stokes (RANS), spatial average Large Eddy Simulation (LES), and hybrid Detached Eddy Simulation (DES), which require less number of degrees of freedom. All of these methods have to be tuned to benchmark problems, and moreover, near the walls, the mesh has to be very fine to resolve boundary layers (which means the computational cost is very expensive). Above all, the results are sensitive to, e.g. explicit parameters in the method, the mesh, etc. As a resolution to the challenge, here we present the adaptive time- resolved Direct FEM Solution (DFS) methodology with numerical tripping, as a predictive, parameter-free family of methods for turbulent flow. We solved the JAXA Standard Model (JSM) aircraft model at realistic Reynolds number, presented as part of the High Lift Prediction Workshop 3. We predicted lift Cl within 5% error vs. experiment, drag Cd within 10% error and stall 1◦ within the angle of attack. The workshop identified a likely experimental error of order 10% for the drag results. The simulation is 10 times faster and cheaper when compared to traditional or existing CFD approaches. The efficiency mainly comes from the slip boundary condition that allows coarse meshes near walls, goal-oriented adaptive error control that refines the mesh only where needed and large time steps using a Schur-type fixed-point iteration method, without compromising the accuracy of the simulation results. As a follow-up, we were invited to the Fifth High Order CFD Workshop, where the approach was validated for a tandem sphere problem (low Reynolds number turbulent flow) wherein a second sphere is placed a certain distance downstream from a first sphere. The results capture the expected slipstream phenomenon, with appx. 2% error. A comparison with the higher-order frameworks Nek500 and PyFR was done. The PyFR framework has demonstrated high effectiveness for GPUs with an unstructured mesh, which is a hard problem in this field. This is achieved by an explicit time-stepping approach. Our study showed that our large time step approach enabled appx. 3 orders of magnitude larger time steps than the explicit time steps in PyFR, which made our method more effective for solving the whole problem. We also presented a generalization of DFS to variable density and validated against the well-established MARIN benchmark problem. The results show good agreement with experimental results in the form of pressure sensors. Later, we used this methodology to solve two applications in multiphase flow problems. One has to do with a flash rainwater storage tank (Bilbao water consortium), and the second is about designing a nozzle for 3D printing. In the flash rainwater storage tank, we predicted that the water height in the tank has a significant influence on how the flow behaves downstream of the tank door (valve). For the 3D printing, we developed an efficient design with the focused jet flow to prevent oxidation and heating at the tip of the nozzle during a melting process. Finally, we presented here the parallelism on multiple GPUs and the embedded system Kalray architecture. Almost all supercomputers today have heterogeneous architectures, such as CPU+GPU or other accelerators, and it is, therefore, essential to develop computational frameworks to take advantage of them. For multiple GPUs, we developed a stencil computation, applied to geological folds simulation. We explored halo computation and used CUDA streams to optimize computation and communication time. The resulting performance gain was 23% for four GPUs with Fermi architecture, and the corresponding improvement obtained on four Kepler GPUs were 47%. The Kalray architecture is designed to have low energy consumption. Here we tested the Jacobi method with different communication strategies. Additionally, visualization is a crucial area when we do scientific simulations. We developed an automated visualization framework, where we could see that task parallelization is more than 10 times faster than data parallelization. We have also used our DFS in the cloud computing setting to validate the simulation against the local cluster simulation. Finally, we recommend the easy pre-processing tool to support DFS simulation.La Caixa 201

Ray tracing techniques for computer games and isosurface visualization

Ray tracing is a powerful image synthesis technique, that has been used for high-quality offline rendering since decades. In recent years, this technique has become more important for realtime applications, but still plays only a minor role in many areas. Some of the reasons are that ray tracing is compute intensive and has to rely on preprocessed data structures to achieve fast performance. This dissertation investigates methods to broaden the applicability of ray tracing and is divided into two parts. The first part explores the opportunities offered by ray tracing based game technology in the context of current and expected future performance levels. In this regard, novel methods are developed to efficiently support certain kinds of dynamic scenes, while avoiding the burden to fully recompute the required data structures. Furthermore, todays ray tracing performance levels are below what is needed for 3D games. Therefore, the multi-core CPU of the Playstation 3 is investigated, and an optimized ray tracing architecture presented to take steps towards the required performance. In part two, the focus shifts to isosurface raytracing. Isosurfaces are particularly important to understand the distribution of certain values in volumetric data. Since the structure of volumetric data sets is diverse, op- timized algorithms and data structures are developed for rectilinear as well as unstructured data sets which allow for realtime rendering of isosurfaces including advanced shading and visualization effects. This also includes tech- niques for out-of-core and time-varying data sets.Ray-tracing ist ein flexibles Bildgebungsverfahren, das schon seit Jahrzehnten für hoch qualitative, aber langsame Bilderzeugung genutzt wird. In den letzten Jahren wurde Ray-tracing auch für Echtzeitanwendungen immer interessanter, spielt aber in vielen Anwendungsbereichen noch immer eine untergeordnete Rolle. Einige der Gründe sind die Rechenintensität von Ray-tracing sowie die Abhängigkeit von vorberechneten Datenstrukturen um hohe Geschwindigkeiten zu erreichen. Diese Dissertation untersucht Methoden um die Anwendbarkeit von Ray-tracing in zwei verschiedenen Bereichen zu erhöhen. Im ersten Teil dieser Dissertation werden die Möglichkeiten, die Ray- tracing basierte Spieletechnologie bietet, im Kontext mit aktueller sowie zukünftig erwarteten Geschwindigkeiten untersucht. Darüber hinaus werden in diesem Zusammenhang Methoden entwickelt um bestimmte zeitveränderliche Szenen darstellen zu können ohne die dafür benötigen Datenstrukturen von Grund auf neu erstellen zu müssen. Da die Geschwindigkeit von Ray-tracing für Spiele bisher nicht ausreichend ist, wird die Mehrkern- CPU der Playstation 3 untersucht, und ein optimiertes Ray-tracing System beschrieben, das Ray-tracing näher an die benötigte Geschwindigkeit heranbringt. Der zweite Teil beschäftigt sich mit der Darstellung von Isoflächen mittels Ray-tracing. Isoflächen sind insbesonders wichtig um die Verteilung einzelner Werte in volumetrischen Datensätzen zu verstehen. Da diese Datensätze verschieden strukturiert sein können, werden für gitterförmige und unstrukturierte Datensätze optimierte Algorithmen und Datenstrukturen entwickelt, die die Echtzeitdarstellung von Isoflächen erlauben. Dies beinhaltet auch Erweiterungen für extrem große und zeitveränderliche Datensätze