Numerics of High Performance Computers and Benchmark Evaluation of Distributed Memory Computers

The internal representation of numerical data, their speed of manipulation to generate the desired result through efficient utilisation of central processing unit, memory, and communication links are essential steps of all high performance scientific computations. Machine parameters, in particular, reveal accuracy and error bounds of computation, required for performance tuning of codes. This paper reports diagnosis of machine parameters, measurement of computing power of several workstations, serial and parallel computers, and a component-wise test procedure for distributed memory computers. Hierarchical memory structure is illustrated by block copying and unrolling techniques. Locality of reference for cache reuse of data is amply demonstrated by fast Fourier transform codes. Cache and register-blocking technique results in their optimum utilisation with consequent gain in throughput during vector-matrix operations. Implementation of these memory management techniques reduces cache inefficiency loss, which is known to be proportional to the number of processors. Of the two Linux clusters-ANUP16, HPC22 and HPC64, it has been found from the measurement of intrinsic parameters and from application benchmark of multi-block Euler code test run that ANUP16 is suitable for problems that exhibit fine-grained parallelism. The delivered performance of ANUP16 is of immense utility for developing high-end PC clusters like HPC64 and customised parallel computers with added advantage of speed and high degree of parallelism

Efficient 3D object recognition via geometric information preservation

© 2019 Elsevier Ltd Accurate 3D object recognition and 6-DOF pose estimation have been pervasively applied to a variety of applications, such as unmanned warehouse, cooperative robots, and manufacturing industry. How to extract a robust and representative feature from the point clouds is an inevitable and important issue. In this paper, an unsupervised feature learning network is introduced to extract 3D keypoint features from point clouds directly, rather than transforming point clouds to voxel grids or projected RGB images, which saves computational time while preserving the object geometric information as well. Specifically, the proposed network features in a stacked point feature encoder, which can stack the local discriminative features within its neighborhoods to the original point-wise feature counterparts. The main framework consists of both offline training phase and online testing phase. In the offline training phase, the stacked point feature encoder is trained first and then generate feature database of all keypoints, which are sampled from synthetic point clouds of multiple model views. In the online testing phase, each feature extracted from the unknown testing scene is matched among the database by using the K-D tree voting strategy. Afterwards, the matching results are achieved by using the hypothesis & verification strategy. The proposed method is extensively evaluated on four public datasets and the results show that ours deliver comparable or even superior performances than the state-of-the-arts in terms of F1-score, Average of the 3D distance (ADD) and Recognition rate

ASCI application performance and the impact of commodity processor architectural trends

The DOE Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) is an applications-driven program requiring use of scalable, high-performance architectures to meet aggressive engineering needs related to safety of the Nation`s nuclear stockpile. ASCI will accelerate development of computational methods and tools for predictive simulation and for virtual prototyping needed to re-certify the existing stockpile, assess the effects of component aging, and to evaluate accident scenarios. The purpose of this paper is to summarize recent performance results from an important ASCI-related application and to speculate on how trends within the computer industry and in computer architecture relate to these results