Computing Petaflops over Terabytes of Data: The Case of Genome-Wide Association Studies

In many scientific and engineering applications, one has to solve not one but a sequence of instances of the same problem. Often times, the problems in the sequence are linked in a way that allows intermediate results to be reused. A characteristic example for this class of applications is given by the Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS), a widely spread tool in computational biology. GWAS entails the solution of up to trillions ($10^{12}$) of correlated generalized least-squares problems, posing a daunting challenge: the performance of petaflops ($10^{15}$ floating-point operations) over terabytes of data. In this paper, we design an algorithm for performing GWAS on multi-core architectures. This is accomplished in three steps. First, we show how to exploit the relation among successive problems, thus reducing the overall computational complexity. Then, through an analysis of the required data transfers, we identify how to eliminate any overhead due to input/output operations. Finally, we study how to decompose computation into tasks to be distributed among the available cores, to attain high performance and scalability. With our algorithm, a GWAS that currently requires the use of a supercomputer may now be performed in matter of hours on a single multi-core node. The discussion centers around the methodology to develop the algorithm rather than the specific application. We believe the paper contributes valuable guidelines of general applicability for computational scientists on how to develop and optimize numerical algorithms

The Family of MapReduce and Large Scale Data Processing Systems

In the last two decades, the continuous increase of computational power has produced an overwhelming flow of data which has called for a paradigm shift in the computing architecture and large scale data processing mechanisms. MapReduce is a simple and powerful programming model that enables easy development of scalable parallel applications to process vast amounts of data on large clusters of commodity machines. It isolates the application from the details of running a distributed program such as issues on data distribution, scheduling and fault tolerance. However, the original implementation of the MapReduce framework had some limitations that have been tackled by many research efforts in several followup works after its introduction. This article provides a comprehensive survey for a family of approaches and mechanisms of large scale data processing mechanisms that have been implemented based on the original idea of the MapReduce framework and are currently gaining a lot of momentum in both research and industrial communities. We also cover a set of introduced systems that have been implemented to provide declarative programming interfaces on top of the MapReduce framework. In addition, we review several large scale data processing systems that resemble some of the ideas of the MapReduce framework for different purposes and application scenarios. Finally, we discuss some of the future research directions for implementing the next generation of MapReduce-like solutions.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1105.4252 by other author

Programming Abstractions for Data Locality

The goal of the workshop and this report is to identify common themes and standardize concepts for locality-preserving abstractions for exascale programming models. Current software tools are built on the premise that computing is the most expensive component, we are rapidly moving to an era that computing is cheap and massively parallel while data movement dominates energy and performance costs. In order to respond to exascale systems (the next generation of high performance computing systems), the scientific computing community needs to refactor their applications to align with the emerging data-centric paradigm. Our applications must be evolved to express information about data locality. Unfortunately current programming environments offer few ways to do so. They ignore the incurred cost of communication and simply rely on the hardware cache coherency to virtualize data movement. With the increasing importance of task-level parallelism on future systems, task models have to support constructs that express data locality and affinity. At the system level, communication libraries implicitly assume all the processing elements are equidistant to each other. In order to take advantage of emerging technologies, application developers need a set of programming abstractions to describe data locality for the new computing ecosystem. The new programming paradigm should be more data centric and allow to describe how to decompose and how to layout data in the memory.Fortunately, there are many emerging concepts such as constructs for tiling, data layout, array views, task and thread affinity, and topology aware communication libraries for managing data locality. There is an opportunity to identify commonalities in strategy to enable us to combine the best of these concepts to develop a comprehensive approach to expressing and managing data locality on exascale programming systems. These programming model abstractions can expose crucial information about data locality to the compiler and runtime system to enable performance-portable code. The research question is to identify the right level of abstraction, which includes techniques that range from template libraries all the way to completely new languages to achieve this goal