467 research outputs found
Multicore Architecture-aware Scientific Applications
Modern high performance systems are becoming increasingly complex and powerful due to advancements in processor and memory architecture. In order to keep up with this increasing complexity, applications have to be augmented with certain capabilities to fully exploit such systems. These may be at the application level, such as static or dynamic adaptations or at the system level, like having strategies in place to override some of the default operating system polices, the main objective being to improve computational performance of the application. The current work proposes two such capabilites with respect to multi-threaded scientific applications, in particular a large scale physics application computing ab-initio nuclear structure. The first involves using a middleware tool to invoke dynamic adaptations in the application, so as to be able to adjust to the changing computational resource availability at run-time. The second involves a strategy for effective placement of data in main memory, to optimize memory access latencies and bandwidth. These capabilties when included were found to have a significant impact on the application performance, resulting in average speedups of as much as two to four times
MPI+X: task-based parallelization and dynamic load balance of finite element assembly
The main computing tasks of a finite element code(FE) for solving partial
differential equations (PDE's) are the algebraic system assembly and the
iterative solver. This work focuses on the first task, in the context of a
hybrid MPI+X paradigm. Although we will describe algorithms in the FE context,
a similar strategy can be straightforwardly applied to other discretization
methods, like the finite volume method. The matrix assembly consists of a loop
over the elements of the MPI partition to compute element matrices and
right-hand sides and their assemblies in the local system to each MPI
partition. In a MPI+X hybrid parallelism context, X has consisted traditionally
of loop parallelism using OpenMP. Several strategies have been proposed in the
literature to implement this loop parallelism, like coloring or substructuring
techniques to circumvent the race condition that appears when assembling the
element system into the local system. The main drawback of the first technique
is the decrease of the IPC due to bad spatial locality. The second technique
avoids this issue but requires extensive changes in the implementation, which
can be cumbersome when several element loops should be treated. We propose an
alternative, based on the task parallelism of the element loop using some
extensions to the OpenMP programming model. The taskification of the assembly
solves both aforementioned problems. In addition, dynamic load balance will be
applied using the DLB library, especially efficient in the presence of hybrid
meshes, where the relative costs of the different elements is impossible to
estimate a priori. This paper presents the proposed methodology, its
implementation and its validation through the solution of large computational
mechanics problems up to 16k cores
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