5,135 research outputs found
QR Factorization of Tall and Skinny Matrices in a Grid Computing Environment
Previous studies have reported that common dense linear algebra operations do
not achieve speed up by using multiple geographical sites of a computational
grid. Because such operations are the building blocks of most scientific
applications, conventional supercomputers are still strongly predominant in
high-performance computing and the use of grids for speeding up large-scale
scientific problems is limited to applications exhibiting parallelism at a
higher level. We have identified two performance bottlenecks in the distributed
memory algorithms implemented in ScaLAPACK, a state-of-the-art dense linear
algebra library. First, because ScaLAPACK assumes a homogeneous communication
network, the implementations of ScaLAPACK algorithms lack locality in their
communication pattern. Second, the number of messages sent in the ScaLAPACK
algorithms is significantly greater than other algorithms that trade flops for
communication. In this paper, we present a new approach for computing a QR
factorization -- one of the main dense linear algebra kernels -- of tall and
skinny matrices in a grid computing environment that overcomes these two
bottlenecks. Our contribution is to articulate a recently proposed algorithm
(Communication Avoiding QR) with a topology-aware middleware (QCG-OMPI) in
order to confine intensive communications (ScaLAPACK calls) within the
different geographical sites. An experimental study conducted on the Grid'5000
platform shows that the resulting performance increases linearly with the
number of geographical sites on large-scale problems (and is in particular
consistently higher than ScaLAPACK's).Comment: Accepted at IPDPS10. (IEEE International Parallel & Distributed
Processing Symposium 2010 in Atlanta, GA, USA.
Pipelining the Fast Multipole Method over a Runtime System
Fast Multipole Methods (FMM) are a fundamental operation for the simulation
of many physical problems. The high performance design of such methods usually
requires to carefully tune the algorithm for both the targeted physics and the
hardware. In this paper, we propose a new approach that achieves high
performance across architectures. Our method consists of expressing the FMM
algorithm as a task flow and employing a state-of-the-art runtime system,
StarPU, in order to process the tasks on the different processing units. We
carefully design the task flow, the mathematical operators, their Central
Processing Unit (CPU) and Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) implementations, as
well as scheduling schemes. We compute potentials and forces of 200 million
particles in 48.7 seconds on a homogeneous 160 cores SGI Altix UV 100 and of 38
million particles in 13.34 seconds on a heterogeneous 12 cores Intel Nehalem
processor enhanced with 3 Nvidia M2090 Fermi GPUs.Comment: No. RR-7981 (2012
State of the Art in Parallel Computing with R
R is a mature open-source programming language for statistical computing and graphics. Many areas of statistical research are experiencing rapid growth in the size of data sets. Methodological advances drive increased use of simulations. A common approach is to use parallel computing. This paper presents an overview of techniques for parallel computing with R on computer clusters, on multi-core systems, and in grid computing. It reviews sixteen different packages, comparing them on their state of development, the parallel technology used, as well as on usability, acceptance, and performance. Two packages (snow, Rmpi) stand out as particularly suited to general use on computer clusters. Packages for grid computing are still in development, with only one package currently available to the end user. For multi-core systems five different packages exist, but a number of issues pose challenges to early adopters. The paper concludes with ideas for further developments in high performance computing with R. Example code is available in the appendix.
Impact of communication times on mixed CPU/GPU applications scheduling using KAAPI
National audienceHigh Performance Computing machines use more and more Graphical Processing Units as they are very efficient for homogeneous computation such as matrix operations. However before using these accelerators, one has to transfer data from the processor to them. Such a transfer can be slow. In this report, our aim is to study the impact of communication times on the makespan of a scheduling. Indeed, with a better anticipation of these communications, we could use the GPUs even more efficiently. More precisely, we will focus on machines with one or more GPUs and on applications with a low ratio of computations over communications. During this study, we have implemented two offline scheduling algorithms within XKAAPI's runtime. Then we have led an experimental study, combining these algorithms to highlight the impact of communication times. Finally our study has shown that, by using communication aware scheduling algorithms, we can reduce substantially the makespan of an application. Our experiments have shown a reduction of this makespan up to on a machine with several GPUs executing homogeneous computations
State-of-the-Art in Parallel Computing with R
R is a mature open-source programming language for statistical computing and graphics. Many areas of statistical research are experiencing rapid growth in the size of data sets. Methodological advances drive increased use of simulations. A common approach is to use parallel computing. This paper presents an overview of techniques for parallel computing with R on computer clusters, on multi-core systems, and in grid computing. It reviews sixteen different packages, comparing them on their state of development, the parallel technology used, as well as on usability, acceptance, and performance. Two packages (snow, Rmpi) stand out as particularly useful for general use on computer clusters. Packages for grid computing are still in development, with only one package currently available to the end user. For multi-core systems four different packages exist, but a number of issues pose challenges to early adopters. The paper concludes with ideas for further developments in high performance computing with R. Example code is available in the appendix
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