2,758 research outputs found
Taking advantage of hybrid systems for sparse direct solvers via task-based runtimes
The ongoing hardware evolution exhibits an escalation in the number, as well
as in the heterogeneity, of computing resources. The pressure to maintain
reasonable levels of performance and portability forces application developers
to leave the traditional programming paradigms and explore alternative
solutions. PaStiX is a parallel sparse direct solver, based on a dynamic
scheduler for modern hierarchical manycore architectures. In this paper, we
study the benefits and limits of replacing the highly specialized internal
scheduler of the PaStiX solver with two generic runtime systems: PaRSEC and
StarPU. The tasks graph of the factorization step is made available to the two
runtimes, providing them the opportunity to process and optimize its traversal
in order to maximize the algorithm efficiency for the targeted hardware
platform. A comparative study of the performance of the PaStiX solver on top of
its native internal scheduler, PaRSEC, and StarPU frameworks, on different
execution environments, is performed. The analysis highlights that these
generic task-based runtimes achieve comparable results to the
application-optimized embedded scheduler on homogeneous platforms. Furthermore,
they are able to significantly speed up the solver on heterogeneous
environments by taking advantage of the accelerators while hiding the
complexity of their efficient manipulation from the programmer.Comment: Heterogeneity in Computing Workshop (2014
Sparse Automatic Differentiation for Large-Scale Computations Using Abstract Elementary Algebra
Most numerical solvers and libraries nowadays are implemented to use
mathematical models created with language-specific built-in data types (e.g.
real in Fortran or double in C) and their respective elementary algebra
implementations. However, built-in elementary algebra typically has limited
functionality and often restricts flexibility of mathematical models and
analysis types that can be applied to those models. To overcome this
limitation, a number of domain-specific languages with more feature-rich
built-in data types have been proposed. In this paper, we argue that if
numerical libraries and solvers are designed to use abstract elementary algebra
rather than language-specific built-in algebra, modern mainstream languages can
be as effective as any domain-specific language. We illustrate our ideas using
the example of sparse Jacobian matrix computation. We implement an automatic
differentiation method that takes advantage of sparse system structures and is
straightforward to parallelize in MPI setting. Furthermore, we show that the
computational cost scales linearly with the size of the system.Comment: Submitted to ACM Transactions on Mathematical Softwar
Enhancing Energy Production with Exascale HPC Methods
High Performance Computing (HPC) resources have become the key actor for achieving more ambitious challenges in many disciplines. In this step beyond, an explosion on the available parallelism and the use of special purpose
processors are crucial. With such a goal, the HPC4E project applies new exascale HPC techniques to energy industry simulations, customizing them if necessary, and going beyond the state-of-the-art in the required HPC exascale
simulations for different energy sources. In this paper, a general overview of these methods is presented as well as some specific preliminary results.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Programme (2014-2020) under the HPC4E Project (www.hpc4e.eu), grant agreement n° 689772, the Spanish Ministry of
Economy and Competitiveness under the CODEC2 project (TIN2015-63562-R), and
from the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation through Rede
Nacional de Pesquisa (RNP). Computer time on Endeavour cluster is provided by the
Intel Corporation, which enabled us to obtain the presented experimental results in
uncertainty quantification in seismic imagingPostprint (author's final draft
GHOST: Building blocks for high performance sparse linear algebra on heterogeneous systems
While many of the architectural details of future exascale-class high
performance computer systems are still a matter of intense research, there
appears to be a general consensus that they will be strongly heterogeneous,
featuring "standard" as well as "accelerated" resources. Today, such resources
are available as multicore processors, graphics processing units (GPUs), and
other accelerators such as the Intel Xeon Phi. Any software infrastructure that
claims usefulness for such environments must be able to meet their inherent
challenges: massive multi-level parallelism, topology, asynchronicity, and
abstraction. The "General, Hybrid, and Optimized Sparse Toolkit" (GHOST) is a
collection of building blocks that targets algorithms dealing with sparse
matrix representations on current and future large-scale systems. It implements
the "MPI+X" paradigm, has a pure C interface, and provides hybrid-parallel
numerical kernels, intelligent resource management, and truly heterogeneous
parallelism for multicore CPUs, Nvidia GPUs, and the Intel Xeon Phi. We
describe the details of its design with respect to the challenges posed by
modern heterogeneous supercomputers and recent algorithmic developments.
Implementation details which are indispensable for achieving high efficiency
are pointed out and their necessity is justified by performance measurements or
predictions based on performance models. The library code and several
applications are available as open source. We also provide instructions on how
to make use of GHOST in existing software packages, together with a case study
which demonstrates the applicability and performance of GHOST as a component
within a larger software stack.Comment: 32 pages, 11 figure
Recent Advances in Graph Partitioning
We survey recent trends in practical algorithms for balanced graph
partitioning together with applications and future research directions
Fast, Exact and Multi-Scale Inference for Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Gaussian CRFs
In this work we propose a structured prediction technique that combines the
virtues of Gaussian Conditional Random Fields (G-CRF) with Deep Learning: (a)
our structured prediction task has a unique global optimum that is obtained
exactly from the solution of a linear system (b) the gradients of our model
parameters are analytically computed using closed form expressions, in contrast
to the memory-demanding contemporary deep structured prediction approaches that
rely on back-propagation-through-time, (c) our pairwise terms do not have to be
simple hand-crafted expressions, as in the line of works building on the
DenseCRF, but can rather be `discovered' from data through deep architectures,
and (d) out system can trained in an end-to-end manner. Building on standard
tools from numerical analysis we develop very efficient algorithms for
inference and learning, as well as a customized technique adapted to the
semantic segmentation task. This efficiency allows us to explore more
sophisticated architectures for structured prediction in deep learning: we
introduce multi-resolution architectures to couple information across scales in
a joint optimization framework, yielding systematic improvements. We
demonstrate the utility of our approach on the challenging VOC PASCAL 2012
image segmentation benchmark, showing substantial improvements over strong
baselines. We make all of our code and experiments available at
{https://github.com/siddharthachandra/gcrf}Comment: Our code is available at https://github.com/siddharthachandra/gcr
- …