6,810 research outputs found
4.45 Pflops Astrophysical N-Body Simulation on K computer -- The Gravitational Trillion-Body Problem
As an entry for the 2012 Gordon-Bell performance prize, we report performance
results of astrophysical N-body simulations of one trillion particles performed
on the full system of K computer. This is the first gravitational trillion-body
simulation in the world. We describe the scientific motivation, the numerical
algorithm, the parallelization strategy, and the performance analysis. Unlike
many previous Gordon-Bell prize winners that used the tree algorithm for
astrophysical N-body simulations, we used the hybrid TreePM method, for similar
level of accuracy in which the short-range force is calculated by the tree
algorithm, and the long-range force is solved by the particle-mesh algorithm.
We developed a highly-tuned gravity kernel for short-range forces, and a novel
communication algorithm for long-range forces. The average performance on 24576
and 82944 nodes of K computer are 1.53 and 4.45 Pflops, which correspond to 49%
and 42% of the peak speed.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, Proceedings of Supercomputing 2012
(http://sc12.supercomputing.org/), Gordon Bell Prize Winner. Additional
information is http://www.ccs.tsukuba.ac.jp/CCS/eng/gbp201
Multidisciplinary computational aerosciences
As the challenges of single disciplinary computational physics are met, such as computational fluid dynamics, computational structural mechanics, computational propulsion, computational aeroacoustics, computational electromagnetics, etc., scientists have begun investigating the combination of these single disciplines into what is being called multidisciplinary computational aerosciences (MCAS). The combination of several disciplines not only offers simulation realism but also formidable computational challenges. The solution of such problems will require computers orders of magnitude larger than those currently available. Such computer power can only be supplied by massively parallel machines because of the current speed-of-light limitation of conventional serial systems. Even with such machines, MCAS problems will require hundreds of hours for their solution. To efficiently utilize such a machine, research is required in three areas that include parallel architectures, systems software, and applications software. The main emphasis of this paper is the applications software element. Examples that demonstrate application software for multidisciplinary problems currently being solved at NASA Ames Research Center are presented. Pacing items for MCAS are discussed such as solution methodology, physical modeling, computer power, and multidisciplinary validation experiments
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MPRAnalyze: statistical framework for massively parallel reporter assays.
Massively parallel reporter assays (MPRAs) can measure the regulatory function of thousands of DNA sequences in a single experiment. Despite growing popularity, MPRA studies are limited by a lack of a unified framework for analyzing the resulting data. Here we present MPRAnalyze: a statistical framework for analyzing MPRA count data. Our model leverages the unique structure of MPRA data to quantify the function of regulatory sequences, compare sequences' activity across different conditions, and provide necessary flexibility in an evolving field. We demonstrate the accuracy and applicability of MPRAnalyze on simulated and published data and compare it with existing methods
Massively Parallel Computation Using Graphics Processors with Application to Optimal Experimentation in Dynamic Control
The rapid increase in the performance of graphics hardware, coupled with recent improvements in its programmability has lead to its adoption in many non-graphics applications, including wide variety of scientific computing fields. At the same time, a number of important dynamic optimal policy problems in economics are athirst of computing power to help overcome dual curses of complexity and dimensionality. We investigate if computational economics may benefit from new tools on a case study of imperfect information dynamic programming problem with learning and experimentation trade-off that is, a choice between controlling the policy target and learning system parameters. Specifically, we use a model of active learning and control of linear autoregression with unknown slope that appeared in a variety of macroeconomic policy and other contexts. The endogeneity of posterior beliefs makes the problem difficult in that the value function need not be convex and policy function need not be continuous. This complication makes the problem a suitable target for massively-parallel computation using graphics processors. Our findings are cautiously optimistic in that new tools let us easily achieve a factor of 15 performance gain relative to an implementation targeting single-core processors and thus establish a better reference point on the computational speed vs. coding complexity trade-off frontier. While further gains and wider applicability may lie behind steep learning barrier, we argue that the future of many computations belong to parallel algorithms anyway.Graphics Processing Units, CUDA programming, Dynamic programming, Learning, Experimentation
Massively Parallel Sort-Merge Joins in Main Memory Multi-Core Database Systems
Two emerging hardware trends will dominate the database system technology in
the near future: increasing main memory capacities of several TB per server and
massively parallel multi-core processing. Many algorithmic and control
techniques in current database technology were devised for disk-based systems
where I/O dominated the performance. In this work we take a new look at the
well-known sort-merge join which, so far, has not been in the focus of research
in scalable massively parallel multi-core data processing as it was deemed
inferior to hash joins. We devise a suite of new massively parallel sort-merge
(MPSM) join algorithms that are based on partial partition-based sorting.
Contrary to classical sort-merge joins, our MPSM algorithms do not rely on a
hard to parallelize final merge step to create one complete sort order. Rather
they work on the independently created runs in parallel. This way our MPSM
algorithms are NUMA-affine as all the sorting is carried out on local memory
partitions. An extensive experimental evaluation on a modern 32-core machine
with one TB of main memory proves the competitive performance of MPSM on large
main memory databases with billions of objects. It scales (almost) linearly in
the number of employed cores and clearly outperforms competing hash join
proposals - in particular it outperforms the "cutting-edge" Vectorwise parallel
query engine by a factor of four.Comment: VLDB201
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