6,023 research outputs found
Skeletons for Distributed Topological Computation
Parallel implementation of topological algorithms is highly desirable, but the challenges, from reconstructing algorithms around independent threads through to runtime load balancing, have proven to be formidable. This problem, made all the more acute by the diversity of hardware platforms, has led to new kinds of implementation platform for computational science, with sophisticated runtime systems managing and coordinating large threadcounts to keep processing elements heavily utilized. While simpler and more portable than direct management of threads, these approaches still entangle program logic with resource management. Similar kinds of highly parallel runtime system have also been developed for functional languages. Here, however, language support for higher-order functions allows a cleaner separation between the algorithm and `skeletons' that express generic patterns of parallel computation. We report results on using this technique to develop a distributed version of the Joint Contour Net, a generalization of the Contour Tree to multifields. We present performance comparisons against a recent Haskell implementation using shared-memory parallelism, and initial work on a skeleton for distributed memory implementation that utilizes an innovative strategy to reduce inter-process communication overheads
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
Geometry-Oblivious FMM for Compressing Dense SPD Matrices
We present GOFMM (geometry-oblivious FMM), a novel method that creates a
hierarchical low-rank approximation, "compression," of an arbitrary dense
symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrix. For many applications, GOFMM enables
an approximate matrix-vector multiplication in or even time,
where is the matrix size. Compression requires storage and work.
In general, our scheme belongs to the family of hierarchical matrix
approximation methods. In particular, it generalizes the fast multipole method
(FMM) to a purely algebraic setting by only requiring the ability to sample
matrix entries. Neither geometric information (i.e., point coordinates) nor
knowledge of how the matrix entries have been generated is required, thus the
term "geometry-oblivious." Also, we introduce a shared-memory parallel scheme
for hierarchical matrix computations that reduces synchronization barriers. We
present results on the Intel Knights Landing and Haswell architectures, and on
the NVIDIA Pascal architecture for a variety of matrices.Comment: 13 pages, accepted by SC'1
Porting Decision Tree Algorithms to Multicore using FastFlow
The whole computer hardware industry embraced multicores. For these machines,
the extreme optimisation of sequential algorithms is no longer sufficient to
squeeze the real machine power, which can be only exploited via thread-level
parallelism. Decision tree algorithms exhibit natural concurrency that makes
them suitable to be parallelised. This paper presents an approach for
easy-yet-efficient porting of an implementation of the C4.5 algorithm on
multicores. The parallel porting requires minimal changes to the original
sequential code, and it is able to exploit up to 7X speedup on an Intel
dual-quad core machine.Comment: 18 pages + cove
MAGDA: A Mobile Agent based Grid Architecture
Mobile agents mean both a technology
and a programming paradigm. They allow for a
flexible approach which can alleviate a number
of issues present in distributed and Grid-based
systems, by means of features such as migration,
cloning, messaging and other provided mechanisms.
In this paper we describe an architecture
(MAGDA – Mobile Agent based Grid Architecture)
we have designed and we are currently
developing to support programming and execution
of mobile agent based application upon Grid
systems
High-Level Programming for Medical Imaging on Multi-GPU Systems Using the SkelCL Library
Application development for modern high-performance systems with Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) relies on low-level programming approaches like CUDA and OpenCL, which leads to complex, lengthy and error-prone programs.
In this paper, we present SkelCL – a high-level programming model for systems with multiple GPUs and its implementation as a library on top of OpenCL. SkelCL provides three main enhancements to the OpenCL standard: 1) computations are conveniently expressed using parallel patterns (skeletons); 2) memory management is simplified using parallel container data types; 3) an automatic data (re)distribution mechanism allows for scalability when using multi-GPU systems.
We use a real-world example from the field of medical imaging to motivate the design of our programming model and we show how application development using SkelCL is simplified without sacrificing performance: we were able to reduce the code size in our imaging example application by 50% while introducing only a moderate runtime overhead of less than 5%
FullSWOF_Paral: Comparison of two parallelization strategies (MPI and SKELGIS) on a software designed for hydrology applications
In this paper, we perform a comparison of two approaches for the
parallelization of an existing, free software, FullSWOF 2D (http://www.
univ-orleans.fr/mapmo/soft/FullSWOF/ that solves shallow water equations for
applications in hydrology) based on a domain decomposition strategy. The first
approach is based on the classical MPI library while the second approach uses
Parallel Algorithmic Skeletons and more precisely a library named SkelGIS
(Skeletons for Geographical Information Systems). The first results presented
in this article show that the two approaches are similar in terms of
performance and scalability. The two implementation strategies are however very
different and we discuss the advantages of each one.Comment: 27 page
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