Optimizing virtual machine scheduling in NUMA multicore systems

An increasing number of new multicore systems use the Non-Uniform Memory Access architecture due to its scalable memory performance. However, the complex interplay among data locality, contention on shared on-chip memory resources, and cross-node data sharing overhead, makes the delivery of an optimal and predictable program performance difficult. Vir-tualization further complicates the scheduling problem. Due to abstract and inaccurate mappings from virtual hardware to machine hardware, program and system-level optimizations are often not effective within virtual machines. We find that the penalty to access the “uncore ” memory subsystem is an effective metric to predict program perfor-mance in NUMA multicore systems. Based on this metric, we add NUMA awareness to the virtual machine scheduling. We propose a Bias Random vCPU Migration (BRM) algorithm that dynamically migrates vCPUs to minimize the system-wide uncore penalty. We have implemented the scheme in the Xen virtual machine monitor. Experiment results on a two-way Intel NUMA multicore system with various workloads show that BRM is able to improve application performance by up to 31.7 % compared with the default Xen credit scheduler. More-over, BRM achieves predictable performance with, on average, no more than 2 % runtime variations. 1

Bandwidth-Aware Page Placement in NUMA

Page placement is a critical problem for memoryintensive applications running on a shared-memory multiprocessor with a non-uniform memory access (NUMA) architecture. State-of-the-art page placement mechanisms interleave pages evenly across NUMA nodes. However, this approach fails to maximize memory throughput in modern NUMA systems, characterised by asymmetric bandwidths and latencies, and sensitive to memory contention and interconnect congestion phenomena. We propose BWAP, a novel page placement mechanism based on asymmetric weighted page interleaving. BWAP combines an analytical performance model of the target NUMA system with on-line iterative tuning of page distribution for a given memory-intensive application. Our experimental evaluation with representative memory-intensive workloads shows that BWAP performs up to 66% better than state-of-the-art techniques. These gains are particularly relevant when multiple co-located applications run in disjoint partitions of a large NUMA machine or when applications do not scale up to the total number of cores.Comment: Accepted at 34th IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), 202

Estimating memory locality for virtual machines on NUMA systems

Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 59-61).The multicore revolution sparked another, similar movement towards scalable memory architectures. With most machines nowadays exhibiting non-uniform memory access (NUMA) properties, software and operating systems have seen the necessity to optimize their memory management to take full advantage of such architectures. Type 1 (native) hypervisors, in particular, are required to extract maximum performance from the underlying hardware, as they often run dozens of virtual machines (VMs) on a single system and provide clients with performance guarantees that must be met. While VM memory demand is often satisfied by CPU caches, memory-intensive workloads may induce a higher rate of last-level cache misses, requiring more accesses to RAM. On today's typical NUMA systems, accessing local RAM is approximately 50% faster than remote RAM. We discovered that current-generation processors from major manufacturers do not provide inexpensive ways to characterize the memory locality achieved by VMs and their constituents. Instead, we present in this thesis a series of techniques based on statistical sampling of memory that produce powerful estimates for NUMA locality and related metrics. Our estimates offer tremendous insight on inefficient placement of VMs and memory, and can be a solid basis for algorithms aiming at dynamic reorganization for improvements in locality, as well as NUMA-aware CPU scheduling algorithms.by Alexandre Milouchev.M. Eng

동시에 실행되는 병렬 처리 어플리케이션들을 위한 병렬성 관리

학위논문 (박사) -- 서울대학교 대학원 : 공과대학 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2020. 8. Bernhard Egger.Running multiple parallel jobs on the same multicore machine is becoming more important to improve utilization of the given hardware resources. While co-location of parallel jobs is common practice, it still remains a challenge for current parallel runtime systems to efficiently execute multiple parallel applications simultaneously. Conventional parallelization runtimes such as OpenMP generate a fixed number of worker threads, typically as many as there are cores in the system, to utilize all physical core resources. On such runtime systems, applications may not achieve their peak performance when given full use of all physical core resources. Moreover, the OS kernel needs to manage all worker threads generated by all running parallel applications, and it may require huge management costs with an increasing number of co-located applications. In this thesis, we focus on improving runtime performance for co-located parallel applications. To achieve this goal, the first idea of this work is to ensure spatial scheduling to execute multiple co-located parallel applications simultaneously. Spatial scheduling that provides distinct core resources for applications is considered a promising and scalable approach for executing co-located applications. Despite the growing importance of spatial scheduling, there are still two fundamental research issues with this approach. First, spatial scheduling requires a runtime support for parallel applications to run efficiently in spatial core allocation that can change at runtime. Second, the scheduler needs to assign the proper number of core resources to applications depending on the applications performance characteristics for better runtime performance. To this end, in this thesis, we present three novel runtime-level techniques to efficiently execute co-located parallel applications with spatial scheduling. First, we present a cooperative runtime technique that provides malleable parallel execution for OpenMP parallel applications. The malleable execution means that applications can dynamically adapt their degree of parallelism to the varying core resource availability. It allows parallel applications to run efficiently at changing core resource availability compared to conventional runtime systems that do not adjust the degree of parallelism of the application. Second, this thesis introduces an analytical performance model that can estimate resource utilization and the performance of parallel programs in dependence of the provided core resources. We observe that the performance of parallel loops is typically limited by memory performance, and employ queueing theory to model the memory performance. The queueing system-based approach allows us to estimate the performance by using closed-form equations and hardware performance counters. Third, we present a core allocation framework to manage core resources between co-located parallel applications. With analytical modeling, we observe that maximizing both CPU utilization and memory bandwidth usage can generally lead to better performance compared to conventional core allocation policies that maximize only CPU usage. The presented core allocation framework optimizes utilization of multi-dimensional resources of CPU cores and memory bandwidth on multi-socket multicore systems based on the cooperative parallel runtime support and the analytical model.멀티코어 시스템에서 여러 개의 병렬 처리 어플리케이션들을 함께 실행시키는 것 은 주어진 하드웨어 자원을 효율적으로 사용하기 위해서 점점 더 중요해지고 있다. 하지만, 현재 런타임 시스템에서 여러 개의 병렬 처리 어플리케이션들을 동시에 효율적으로 실행시키는 것은 여전히 어려운 문제이다. OpenMP와 같이 통상 사 용되는 병렬화 런타임 시스템들은 모든 하드웨어 코어 자원을 사용하기 위해서 일반적으로 코어 개수 만큼 스레드를 생성하여 어플리케이션을 실행시킨다. 이 때, 어플리케이션은 모든 코어 자원을 활용할 때 오히려 최적의 성능을 얻지 못할 수도 있으며, 운영체제 커널의 부하는 실행되는 어플리케이션의 개수가 늘어날 수록 관리해야 하는 스레드의 개수가 늘어나기 때문에 계속해서 커지게 된다. 본 학위 논문에서, 우리는 함께 실행되는 병렬 처리 어플리케이션들의 런타임 성능을 높이는 것에 집중한다. 이를 위해, 본 연구의 핵심 목표는 함께 실행되는 어플리케이션들에게 공간 분할식 스케줄링 방법을 적용하는 것이다. 각 어플리 케이션에게 독립적인 코어 자원을 할당해주는 공간 분할식 스케줄링은 점점 더 늘어나는 코어 자원의 개수를 효율적으로 관리하기 위한 방법으로 많은 관심을 받고 있다. 하지만, 공간 분할 스케줄링 방법을 통해 어플리케이션을 실행시키는 것은 두 가지 연구 과제를 가지고 있다. 먼저, 각 어플리케이션은 가변적인 코어 자원 상에서 효율적으로 실행되기 위한 런타임 기술을 필요로 하고, 스케줄러는 어플리케이션들의 성능 특성을 고려해서 런타임 성능을 높일 수 있도록 적당한 수의 코어 자원을 제공해야한다. 이 학위 논문에서, 우리는 함께 실행되는 병렬 처리 어플리케이션들을 공간 분 할 스케줄링을 통해서 효율적으로 실행시키기 위한 세가지 런타임 시스템 기술을 소개한다. 먼저 우리는 협동적인 런타임 시스템이라는 기술을 소개하는데, 이는 OpenMP 병렬 처리 어플리케이션들에게 유연하고 효율적인 실행 환경을 제공한다. 이 기술은 공유 메모리 병렬 실행에 내재되어 있는 특성을 활용하여 병렬처리 프로그램들이 변화하는 코어 자원에 맞추어 병렬성의 정도를 동적으로 조절할 수 있도록 해준다. 이러한 유연한 실행 모델은 병렬 어플리케이션들이 사용 가능한 코어 자원이 동적으로 변화하는 환경에서 어플리케이션의 스레드 수준 병렬성을 다루지 못하는 기존 런타임 시스템들에 비해서 더 효율적으로 실행될 수 있도록 해준다. 두번째로, 본 논문은 사용되는 코어 자원에 따른 병렬처리 프로그램의 성능 및 자원 활용도를 예측할 수 있도록 해주는 분석적 성능 모델을 소개한다. 병렬 처리 코드의 성능 확장성이 일반적으로 메모리 성능에 좌우된다는 관찰에 기초하여, 제 안된 해석 모델은 큐잉 이론을 활용하여 메모리 시스템의 성능 정보들을 계산한다. 이 큐잉 시스템에 기반한 방법은 유용한 성능 정보들을 수식을 통해 효율적으로 계산할 수 있도록 하며 상용 시스템에서 제공하는 하드웨어 성능 카운터만을 요구 하기 때문에 활용 가능성 또한 높다. 마지막으로, 본 논문은 동시에 실행되는 병렬 처리 어플리케이션들 사이에서 코어 자원을 할당해주는 프레임워크를 소개한다. 제안된 프레임워크는 동시에 동 작하는 병렬 처리 어플리케이션의 병렬성 및 코어 자원을 관리하여 멀티 소켓 멀티코어 시스템에서 CPU 자원 및 메모리 대역폭 자원 활용도를 동시에 최적 화한다. 해석적인 모델링과 제안된 코어 할당 프레임워크의 성능 평가를 통해서, 우리가 제안하는 정책이 일반적인 경우에 CPU 자원의 활용도만을 최적화하는 방법에 비해서 함께 동작하는 어플리케이션들의 실행시간을 감소시킬 수 있음을 보여준다.1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation 1 1.2 Background 5 1.2.1 The OpenMP Runtime System 5 1.2.2 Target Multi-Socket Multicore Systems 7 1.3 Contributions 8 1.3.1 Cooperative Runtime Systems 9 1.3.2 Performance Modeling 9 1.3.3 Parallelism Management 10 1.4 Related Work 11 1.4.1 Cooperative Runtime Systems 11 1.4.2 Performance Modeling 12 1.4.3 Parallelism Management 14 1.5 Organization of this Thesis 15 2 Dynamic Spatial Scheduling with Cooperative Runtime Systems 17 2.1 Overview 17 2.2 Malleable Workloads 19 2.3 Cooperative OpenMP Runtime System 21 2.3.1 Cooperative User-Level Tasking 22 2.3.2 Cooperative Dynamic Loop Scheduling 27 2.4 Experimental Results 30 2.4.1 Standalone Application Performance 30 2.4.2 Performance in Spatial Core Allocation 33 2.5 Discussion 35 2.5.1 Contributions 35 2.5.2 Limitations and Future Work 36 2.5.3 Summary 37 3 Performance Modeling of Parallel Loops using Queueing Systems 38 3.1 Overview 38 3.2 Background 41 3.2.1 Queueing Models 41 3.2.2 Insights on Performance Modeling of Parallel Loops 43 3.2.3 Performance Analysis 46 3.3 Queueing Systems for Multi-Socket Multicores 54 3.3.1 Hierarchical Queueing Systems 54 3.3.2 Computingthe Parameter Values 60 3.4 The Speedup Prediction Model 63 3.4.1 The Speedup Model 63 3.4.2 Implementation 64 3.5 Evaluation 65 3.5.1 64-core AMD Opteron Platform 66 3.5.2 72-core Intel Xeon Platform 68 3.6 Discussion 70 3.6.1 Applicability of the Model 70 3.6.2 Limitations of the Model 72 3.6.3 Summary 73 4 Maximizing System Utilization via Parallelism Management 74 4.1 Overview 74 4.2 Background 76 4.2.1 Modeling Performance Metrics 76 4.2.2 Our Resource Management Policy 79 4.3 NuPoCo: Parallelism Management for Co-Located Parallel Loops 82 4.3.1 Online Performance Model 82 4.3.2 Managing Parallelism 86 4.4 Evaluation of NuPoCo 90 4.4.1 Evaluation Scenario 1 90 4.4.2 Evaluation Scenario 2 98 4.5 MOCA: An Evolutionary Approach to Core Allocation 103 4.5.1 Evolutionary Core Allocation 104 4.5.2 Model-Based Allocation 106 4.6 Evaluation of MOCA 113 4.7 Discussion 118 4.7.1 Contributions and Limitations 118 4.7.2 Summary 119 5 Conclusion and Future Work 120 5.1 Conclusion 120 5.2 Future work 122 5.2.1 Improving Multi-Objective Core Allocation 122 5.2.2 Co-Scheduling of Parallel Jobs for HPC Systems 123 A Additional Experiments for the Performance Model 124 A.1 Memory Access Distribution and Poisson Distribution 124 A.1.1 Memory Access Distribution 124 A.1.2 Kolmogorov Smirnov Test 127 A.2 Additional Performance Modeling Results 134 A.2.1 Results with Intel Hyperthreading 134 A.2.2 Results with Cooperative User-Level Tasking 134 A.2.3 Results with Other Loop Schedulers 138 A.2.4 Results with Different Number of Memory Nodes 138 B Other Research Contributions of the Author 141 B.1 Compiler and Runtime Support for Integrated CPU-GPU Systems 141 B.2 Modeling NUMA Architectures with Stochastic Tool 143 B.3 Runtime Environment for a Manycore Architecture 143 초록 159 Acknowledgements 161Docto

Compilation techniques to support memory migration on NUMA systems

Orientadores: Edson Borin, Fernando Magno Quintão PereiraDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: Com o avanço cada vez maior dos processadores de múltiplos núcleos, devido especialmente à barreira tecnológica imposta por limitações físicas no crescimento da frequência de operação dos processadores, arquiteturas de memória não-uniforme (NUMA) estão se difundindo como solução para a escalabilidade de projetos de alto desempenho computacional. Tais arquiteturas não são isentas de problemas, especialmente em se tratando do acesso à memória; má alocação de memória pode causar contenção no acesso aos dados e gerar redução significativa no desempenho de aplicações. Neste trabalho apresentamos a técnica Selective Page Migration (SPM), uma otimização no âmbito de compiladores que, através da análise de laços e suas propriedades, e dos vetores acessados dentro de tais laços, realiza a migração seletiva de páginas de memória segundo uma heurística. Seu objetivo é atenuar problemas de contenção e má alocação de memória em arquiteturas NUMA, sem que haja necessidade de se modificar código-fonte ou utilizar hardwares ou sistemas operacionais específicos. Para tanto, análises de compilação foram implementadas para instrumentação de código-fonte em busca de estruturas cujos dados sejam propícios à migração; ainda, uma heurística foi desenvolvida, capaz de avaliar se a migração de páginas se faz interessante ou se potencialmente prejudicaria o desempenho da aplicação. Obtivemos bons resultados, com ganho de desempenho de mais de 5x para alguns benchmarks - realizamos análises comparativas com outros dois mecanismos usados com o mesmo objetivo, e também apresentamos uma avaliação teórica de uma variedade de técnicas com o mesmo propósito de SPMAbstract: Multicore processors are increasingly common, especially due to technological barrier imposed by physical limitations in the growth of processors clock frequency. Non-uniform memory architecture (NUMA) are spreading as a solution to the scalability of high performance computing applications - such architectures, however, still exhibits problems, especially in the case of memory accesses. Bad data placement can cause contention on memory access leading to significant decrease in applications performance. We present Selective Page Migration (SPM), a compiler optimization that, by analyzing loops and their properties along with arrays accessed within such loops, can perform selective page migration according to a heuristic. The goal is to mitigate contention issues and bad data placement in NUMA architectures with no need to modify source code or using specific hardware or operating systems. To achieve this goal, compilation transformations have been implemented so we can perform source code instrumentation to find data structures that, once migrated, lead to an increase in program performance. Also, a heuristic has been developed so we're able to assess whether the migration of those data structures are likely to become profitable or will potentially impair the application performance. We've achieved good results, with speedup of more than 5x for some benchmarks. We have compared SPM with another two mechanisms used with the same goal, and also presented a theoretical evaluation of a variety of techniques with the same end of SPMMestradoCiência da ComputaçãoMestre em Ciência da Computação2013/18794-3FAPES

Predicting Application Performance for Chip Multiprocessors

Today's computers have processors with multiple cores that allow several applications to execute simultaneously. The way resources are allocated to an application affects whether performance objectives, such as quality of service (QoS), are satisfied. To ensure objectives are met, resources must be carefully but quickly allocated in response to changing runtime conditions. Traditional approaches to resource allocation take place either purely online or offline. Online methods do not scale to large, multiple core systems because there are too many allocations to evaluate at runtime. Offline methods cannot handle unanticipated workloads or changes. A hybrid approach could combine the lower runtime overhead of offline approaches with the flexibility of online approaches. This thesis introduces AUTO, a hybrid solution to perform resource allocation. AUTO dynamically adjusts thread count, core count, and core type. It does so in accordance with a user-provided policy to meet performance objectives. AUTO's capabilities come from four prediction techniques. The first technique builds and uses models that consider CPU contention and application scalability in order to select co-running applications' thread counts. The second technique predicts applications' preferred thread-to-core mappings. The predictions are thread count independent and are translated into concrete thread-to-core mappings based on resource availability. The third technique predicts application performance under thread-to-core mappings. The final technique selects thread count and core count for applications on a system with cores of different capabilities. AUTO was tested in several scenarios. In each scenario, it was shown to be an effective, efficient solution to resource allocation. First, it was used to select the thread count of one or more co-running applications. Second, it was used to select application thread-to-core mappings. Third, it was used to make predictions about application performance under thread-to-core mappings. Finally, it was used to select both thread count and core type for applications on a computer with cores of different capabilities. AUTO's resource allocation and models allow for more effective and more efficient policies. By using hybrid online and offline techniques, AUTO solves the problem of allocating threads and cores to meet performance objectives

On the programmability of multi-GPU computing systems

Multi-GPU systems are widely used in High Performance Computing environments to accelerate scientific computations. This trend is expected to continue as integrated GPUs will be introduced to processors used in multi-socket servers and servers will pack a higher number of GPUs per node. GPUs are currently connected to the system through the PCI Express interconnect, which provides limited bandwidth (compared to the bandwidth of the memory in GPUs) and it often becomes a bottleneck for performance scalability. Current programming models present GPUs as isolated devices with their own memory, even if they share the host memory with the CPU. Programmers explicitly manage allocations in all GPU memories and use primitives to communicate data between GPUs. Furthermore, programmers are required to use mechanisms such as command queues and inter-GPU synchronization. This explicit model harms the maintainability of the code and introduces new sources for potential errors. The first proposal of this thesis is the HPE model. HPE builds a simple, consistent programming interface based on three major features. (1) All device address spaces are combined with the host address space to form a Unified Virtual Address Space. (2) Programs are provided with an Asymmetric Distributed Shared Memory system for all the GPUs in the system. It allows to allocate memory objects that can be accessed by any GPU or CPU. (3) Every CPU thread can request a data exchange between any two GPUs, through simple memory copy calls. Such a simple interface allows HPE to provide always the optimal implementation; eliminating the need for application code to handle different system topologies. Experimental results show improvements on real applications that range from 5% in compute-bound benchmarks to 2.6x in communication-bound benchmarks. HPE transparently implements sophisticated communication schemes that can deliver up to a 2.9x speedup in I/O device transfers. The second proposal of this thesis is a shared memory programming model that exploits the new GPU capabilities for remote memory accesses to remove the need for explicit communication between GPUs. This model turns a multi-GPU system into a shared memory system with NUMA characteristics. In order to validate the viability of the model we also perform an exhaustive performance analysis of remote memory accesses over PCIe. We show that the unique characteristics of the GPU execution model and memory hierarchy help to hide the costs of remote memory accesses. Results show that PCI Express 3.0 is able to hide the costs of up to a 10% of remote memory accesses depending on the access pattern, while caching of remote memory accesses can have a large performance impact on kernel performance. Finally, we introduce AMGE, a programming interface, compiler support and runtime system that automatically executes computations that are programmed for a single GPU across all the GPUs in the system. The programming interface provides a data type for multidimensional arrays that allows for robust, transparent distribution of arrays across all GPU memories. The compiler extracts the dimensionality information from the type of each array, and is able to determine the access pattern in each dimension of the array. The runtime system uses the compiler-provided information to automatically choose the best computation and data distribution configuration to minimize inter-GPU communication and memory footprint. This model effectively frees programmers from the task of decomposing and distributing computation and data to exploit several GPUs. AMGE achieves almost linear speedups for a wide range of dense computation benchmarks on a real 4-GPU system with an interconnect with moderate bandwidth. We show that irregular computations can also benefit from AMGE, too.Los sistemas multi-GPU son muy comúnmente utilizados en entornos de computación de altas prestaciones para acelerar cálculos científicos. Esta tendencia continuará con la introducción de GPUs integradas en los procesadores de los servidores procesador y con una mayor densidad de GPUs por nodo. Las GPUs actualmente se contectan al sistema a través de una interconexión PCI Express, que provee un ancho de banda reducido (comparado con las memorias de las GPUs) y habitualmente se convierte en el cuello de botella para escalar el rendimiento. Los modelos de programación actuales exponen las GPUs como dispositivos aislados con su propia memoria, incluso si comparten la memoria física con la CPU. Los programadores manejan diferentes reservas en todas las memorias de GPU y usan primitivas para comunicar datos entre GPUs. Además, los programadores deben utilizar mecanismos como colas de comandos y sincronicación entre GPUs. Este modelo explícito empeora la programabilidad del código e introduce nuevas fuentes de errores potenciales. La primera propuesta de esta tesis es el modelo HPE. HPE construye una interfaz de programaci ón consistente basada en tres características principales. (1) Todos los espacios de direcciones de los dispositivos son combinados para formar un espacio de direcciones unificado. (2) Los programas usan un sistema asimétrico distribuido de memoria compartida para todas las GPUs del sistema, que permite declarar objetos de memoria que pueden ser accedidos por cualquier GPU o CPU. (3) Cada hilo de ejecución de la CPU puede lanzar un intercambio de datos entre dos GPUs a través de simples llamadas de copia de memoria. Esta interfaz simplificada permite a HPE usar la implementaci ón óptima; sinque la aplicación contemple diferentes topologías de sistema. Los resultados experimentales muestran mejoras en aplicaciones reales que van desde un 5% en aplicaciones limitadas por el cómputo a 2.6x aplicaciones imitadas por la comunicación. HPE implementa sofisticados esquemas de transferencia para dispositivos de E/S que proporcionan mejoras de rendimiento de 2.9x. La segunda propuesta de esta tesis es un modelo de programación basado en memoria compartida que aprovecha las nuevas capacidades acceso remoto de memoria de las GPUs para eliminar la comunicación explícita entre memorias de GPU. Este modelo convierte un sistema multi-GPU en un sistema de memoria compartida con características NUMA. Para validar la viabilidad del modelo realizamos un anlásis exhaustivo del rendimiento los accessos de memoria remotos sobre PCIe. Los resultados muestran que PCI Express 3.0 elimina los costes de hasta un 10% de accesos remotos, dependiendo en el patrón de acceso, mientras que guardar los accesos remotos en memorias cache tiene un gran inpacto en el rendimiento de las computaciones. Finalmente, presentamos AMGE, una interfaz de programación con soporte de compilación y un sistema que ejecuta, de forma automática, computaciones programadas para una única GPU en todas las GPUs del sistema. La interfaz de programación proporciona un tipo de datos para arreglos multidimensionales que permite una distribuci ón transparente y robusta de los datos en todas las memorias de GPU. El compilador extrae la información sobre la dimensionalidad de cada arreglo y puede determinar el patrón de acceso en cada dimensión de forma individual. El sistema utiliza, en tiempo de ejecución, la información del compilador para elegir la mejor descomposición de la computación y los datos para minimizar la comunicación entre GPUs y el uso de memoria. AMGE consigue mejoras de rendimiento que crecen de forma lineal con el número de GPUs para un amplio abanico de computaciones densas en un sistema real con 4 GPUs. También mostramos que las computaciones con patrones irregulares también se pueden beneficiar de AMGE