Efficient nearest-neighbor computation for GPU-based motion planning

Abstract — We present a novel k-nearest neighbor search algorithm (KNNS) for proximity computation in motion planning algorithm that exploits the computational capa-bilities of many-core GPUs. Our approach uses locality sen-sitive hashing and cuckoo hashing to construct an efficient KNNS algorithm that has linear space and time complexity and exploits the multiple cores and data parallelism effec-tively. In practice, we see magnitude improvement in speed and scalability over prior GPU-based KNNS algorithm. On some benchmarks, our KNNS algorithm improves the performance of overall planner by 20−40 times for CPU-based planner and up to 2 times for GPU-based planner. I

A Platform for Scalable Low-Latency Analytics using MapReduce

Today, the ability to process big data has become crucial to the information needs of many enterprise businesses, scientific applications, and governments. Recently, there have been increasing needs of processing data that is not only big but also fast . Here fast data refers to high-speed real-time and near real-time data streams, such as Twitter feeds, search query streams, click streams, impressions, and system logs. To handle both historical data and real-time data, many companies have to maintain multiple systems. However, recent real-world case studies show that maintaining multiple systems cause not only code duplication, but also intensive manual work to partition the analytics workloads and determine which data is processed by which system. These issues point to the need for a general, unified data processing framework to support analytical queries with different latency requirements. This thesis takes a further step towards building a general, unified system for big and fast data analytics. In order to build such a system, I propose to build on existing solutions on data parallelism and extend them with two new features: incremental processing and stream processing with latency constraints. This thesis starts with Hadoop, the most popular open-source MapReduce implementation, which provides proven scalability based on data parallelism. I answer the following questions: (1) Is Hadoop able to support incremental processing? (2) What are the necessary architecture changes in order to support incremental processing? (3) What are the additional design features needed to support stream processing with latency constraints? The thesis includes three parts that answer each of the questions. The first part of the thesis validates whether the existing MapReduce implementations can support incremental processing. Incremental processing means that computation is performed as soon as the relevant data becomes available. My extensive benchmark study of Hadoop-based MapReduce systems shows that the widely-used sort-merge implementation for partitioning and parallel processing poses a fundamental barrier to incremental computation. I further propose a cost model, and optimize the Hadoop system configuration based on the model. The benchmark results over the optimized system verify that the barrier to incremental computation is intrinsic, and cannot be removed by tuning system parameters. In the second part of the thesis, I employ various purely hash-based techniques to enable fast in-memory incremental processing in MapReduce, and frequent key based techniques to extend such processing to workloads that require memory more than available. I evaluate my Hadoop-based prototype equipped with all proposed techniques. The results show that the hash techniques allow the reduce progress to keep up with the map progress with up to 3 orders of magnitude reduction of internal disk spills, and enable results to be returned early. The third part of the thesis aims to support stream processing with latency constraints based on the incremental processing platform resulted from the second part. I perform a benchmark study to understand the sources of latency. I then propose a number of necessary architecture changes to support stream processing, and augment the platform with new latency-aware model-driven resource planning and latency-aware runtime scheduling techniques to meet user-specified latency constraints while maximizing throughput. Experiments using real-world workloads show that the techniques reduce the latency from tens or hundreds of seconds to sub-second, with 2x-5x increase in throughput. The new platform offers 1-2 orders of magnitude improvements over Storm, a commercial-grade distributed stream system, and Spark Streaming, a state-of-the-art academic prototype, when considering both latency and throughput

Efficient configuration space construction and optimization

The configuration space is a fundamental concept that is widely used in algorithmic robotics. Many applications in robotics, computer-aided design, and related areas can be reduced to computational problems in terms of configuration spaces. In this dissertation, we address three main computational challenges related to configuration spaces: 1) how to efficiently compute an approximate representation of high-dimensional configuration spaces; 2) how to efficiently perform geometric, proximity, and motion planning queries in high dimensional configuration spaces; and 3) how to model uncertainty in configuration spaces represented by noisy sensor data. We present new configuration space construction algorithms based on machine learning and geometric approximation techniques. These algorithms perform collision queries on many configuration samples. The collision query results are used to compute an approximate representation for the configuration space, which quickly converges to the exact configuration space. We highlight the efficiency of our algorithms for penetration depth computation and instance-based motion planning. We also present parallel GPU-based algorithms to accelerate the performance of optimization and search computations in configuration spaces. In particular, we design efficient GPU-based parallel k-nearest neighbor and parallel collision detection algorithms and use these algorithms to accelerate motion planning. In order to extend configuration space algorithms to handle noisy sensor data arising from real-world robotics applications, we model the uncertainty in the configuration space by formulating the collision probabilities for noisy data. We use these algorithms to perform reliable motion planning for the PR2 robot.Doctor of Philosoph

Enabling parallelism and optimizations in data mining algorithms for power-law data

Today's data mining tasks aim to extract meaningful information from a large amount of data in a reasonable time mainly via means of --- a) algorithmic advances, such as fast approximate algorithms and efficient learning algorithms, and b) architectural advances, such as machines with massive compute capacity involving distributed multi-core processors and high throughput accelerators. For current and future generation processors, parallel algorithms are critical for fully utilizing computing resources. Furthermore, exploiting data properties for performance gain becomes crucial for data mining applications. In this work, we focus our attention on power-law behavior –-- a common property found in a large class of data, such as text data, internet traffic, and click-stream data. Specifically, we address the following questions in the context of power-law data: How well do the critical data mining algorithms of current interest fit with today's parallel architectures? Which algorithmic and mapping opportunities can be leveraged to further improve performance?, and What are the relative challenges and gains for such approaches? Specifically, we first investigate the suitability of the "frequency estimation" problem for GPU-scale parallelism. Sketching algorithms are a popular choice for this task due to their desirable trade-off between estimation accuracy and space-time efficiency. However, most of the past work on sketch-based frequency estimation focused on CPU implementations. In our work, we propose a novel approach for sketches, which exploits the natural skewness in the power-law data to efficiently utilize the massive amounts of parallelism in modern GPUs. Next, we explore the problem of "identifying top-K frequent elements" for distributed data streams on modern distributed settings with both multi-core and multi-node CPU parallelism. Sketch-based approaches, such as Count-Min Sketch (CMS) with top-K heap, have an excellent update time but lacks the important property of reducibility, which is needed for exploiting data parallelism. On the other end, the popular Frequent Algorithm (FA) leads to reducible summaries, but its update costs are high. Our approach Topkapi, gives the best of both worlds, i.e., it is reducible like FA and has an efficient update time similar to CMS. For power-law data, Topkapi possesses strong theoretical guarantees and leads to significant performance gains, relative to past work. Finally, we study Word2Vec, a popular word embedding method widely used in Machine learning and Natural Language Processing applications, such as machine translation, sentiment analysis, and query answering. This time, we target Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) parallelism. With the increasing vector lengths in commodity CPUs, such as AVX-512 with a vector length of 512 bits, efficient vector processing unit utilization becomes a major performance game-changer. By employing a static multi-version code generation strategy coupled with an algorithmic approximation based on the power-law frequency distribution of words, we achieve significant reductions in training time relative to the state-of-the-art.Ph.D

Fast kk-NNG construction with GPU-based quick multi-select

In this paper we describe a new brute force algorithm for building the $k$-Nearest Neighbor Graph ($k$-NNG). The $k$-NNG algorithm has many applications in areas such as machine learning, bio-informatics, and clustering analysis. While there are very efficient algorithms for data of low dimensions, for high dimensional data the brute force search is the best algorithm. There are two main parts to the algorithm: the first part is finding the distances between the input vectors which may be formulated as a matrix multiplication problem. The second is the selection of the $k$-NNs for each of the query vectors. For the second part, we describe a novel graphics processing unit (GPU) -based multi-select algorithm based on quick sort. Our optimization makes clever use of warp voting functions available on the latest GPUs along with use-controlled cache. Benchmarks show significant improvement over state-of-the-art implementations of the $k$-NN search on GPUs

Optimizing MapReduce for Multicore Architectures

MapReduce is a programming model for data-parallel programs originally intended for data centers. MapReduce simplifies parallel programming, hiding synchronization and task management. These properties make it a promising programming model for future processors with many cores, and existing MapReduce libraries such as Phoenix have demonstrated that applications written with MapReduce perform competitively with those written with Pthreads. This paper explores the design of the MapReduce data structures for grouping intermediate key/value pairs, which is often a performance bottleneck on multicore processors. The paper finds the best choice depends on workload characteristics, such as the number of keys used by the application, the degree of repetition of keys, etc. This paper also introduces a new MapReduce library, Metis, with a compromise data structure designed to perform well for most workloads. Experiments with the Phoenix benchmarks on a 16-core AMD-based servershow that Metisâ data structure performs better than simpler alternatives, including Phoenix