UPCBLAS: a library for parallel matrix computations in Unified Parallel C

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: González‐Domínguez, J. , Martín, M. J., Taboada, G. L., Touriño, J. , Doallo, R. , Mallón, D. A. and Wibecan, B. (2012), UPCBLAS: a library for parallel matrix computations in Unified Parallel C. Concurrency Computat.: Pract. Exper., 24: 1645-1667. doi:10.1002/cpe.1914, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1002/cpe.1914. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions.[Abstract] The popularity of Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages has increased during the last years thanks to their high programmability and performance through an efficient exploitation of data locality, especially on hierarchical architectures such as multicore clusters. This paper describes UPCBLAS, a parallel numerical library for dense matrix computations using the PGAS Unified Parallel C language. The routines developed in UPCBLAS are built on top of sequential basic linear algebra subprograms functions and exploit the particularities of the PGAS paradigm, taking into account data locality in order to achieve a good performance. Furthermore, the routines implement other optimization techniques, several of them by automatically taking into account the hardware characteristics of the underlying systems on which they are executed. The library has been experimentally evaluated on a multicore supercomputer and compared with a message‐passing‐based parallel numerical library, demonstrating good scalability and efficiency.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación; TIN2010-16735Ministerio de Educación; AP2008-0157

Leveraging task-parallelism in message-passing dense matrix factorizations using SMPSs

In this paper, we investigate how to exploit task-parallelism during the execution of the Cholesky factorization on clusters of multicore processors with the SMPSs programming model. Our analysis reveals that the major difficulties in adapting the code for this operation in ScaLAPACK to SMPSs lie in algorithmic restrictions and the semantics of the SMPSs programming model, but also that they both can be overcome with a limited programming effort. The experimental results report considerable gains in performance and scalability of the routine parallelized with SMPSs when compared with conventional approaches to execute the original ScaLAPACK implementation in parallel as well as two recent message-passing routines for this operation. In summary, our study opens the door to the possibility of reusing message-passing legacy codes/libraries for linear algebra, by introducing up-to-date techniques like dynamic out-of-order scheduling that significantly upgrade their performance, while avoiding a costly rewrite/reimplementation.This research was supported by Project EU INFRA-2010-1.2.2 \TEXT:Towards EXa op applicaTions". The researcher at BSC-CNS was supported by the HiPEAC-2 Network of Excellence (FP7/ICT 217068), the Spanish Ministry of Education (CICYT TIN2011-23283, TIN2007-60625 and CSD2007- 00050), and the Generalitat de Catalunya (2009-SGR-980). The researcher at CIMNE was partially funded by the UPC postdoctoral grants under the programme \BKC5-Atracció i Fidelització de talent al BKC". The researcher at UJI was supported by project CICYT TIN2008-06570-C04-01 and FEDER. We thank Jesus Labarta, from BSC-CNS, for helpful discussions on SMPSs and his help with the performance analysis of the codes with Paraver. We thank Vladimir Marjanovic, also from BSC-CNS, for his help in the set-up and tuning of the MPI/SMPSs tools on JuRoPa. Finally, we thank Rafael Mayo, from UJI, for his support in the preliminary stages of this work. The authors gratefully acknowledge the computing time granted on the supercomputer JuRoPa at Jülich Supercomputing Centrer.Peer ReviewedPreprin

Parallel computing 2011, ParCo 2011: book of abstracts

This book contains the abstracts of the presentations at the conference Parallel Computing 2011, 30 August - 2 September 2011, Ghent, Belgiu

UPCBLAS : a numerical library for unified parallel C with architecture-aware optimizations

[Abstract] The popularity of Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages has increased during the last years thanks to their high programmability and performance through an efficient exploitation of data locality, especially on hierarchical architectures like multicore clusters. This PhD Thesis describes UPCBLAS, a parallel library for numerical computation using the PGAS Unified Parallel C (UPC) language. The routines are built on top of sequential BLAS and SparseBLAS functions and exploit the particularities of the PGAS paradigm, taking into account data locality in order to achieve a good performance. However, the growing complexity in computer system hierarchies due to the increase in the number of cores per processor, levels of cache (some of them shared) and the number of processors per node, as well as the high-speed interconnects, demands the use of new optimization techniques and libraries that take advantage of their features. For this reason, this Thesis also presents Servet, a suite of benchmarks focused on detecting a set of parameters with high in uence on the overall performance of multicore systems. UPCBLAS routines use the hardware parameters provided by Servet to implement optimization techniques that improve their performance. The performance of the library has been experimentally evaluated on several multicore supercomputers and compared to message-passing-based parallel numerical libraries, demonstrating good scalability and efficiency. UPCBLAS has also been used to develop more complex numerical codes in order to demonstrate that it is a good alternative to MPI-based libraries for increasing the productivity of numerical application developers