Performance analysis, modeling and prediction of a parallel multiblock lattice Boltzmann application using prophesy system

Recently, the Lattice Boltzmann method is widely used in simulating fluid flows. In this paper, we present the performance analysis, modeling and prediction of a parallel multiblock Lattice Boltzmann application on up to 512 processors on three SMP clusters: two IBM SP systems at San Diego Supercomputing Center (DataStar – p655 and p690) and one IBM SP system at the DOE National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (Seaborg) using the Prophesy system. By characterizing the performance of the Lattice Boltzmann application as the problem size and the number of processors increase, we can identify and eliminate performance bottlenecks, and predict the application performance. The experimental results indicate that the application with large problem sizes scales well across these three clusters, and performance models using the coupling method are accurate with less than 4.8 % average relative prediction error. 1

ADEPT Runtime/Scalability Predictor in support of Adaptive Scheduling

A job scheduler determines the order and duration of the allocation of resources, e.g. CPU, to the tasks waiting to run on a computer. Round-Robin and First-Come-First-Serve are examples of algorithms for making such resource allocation decisions. Parallel job schedulers make resource allocation decisions for applications that need multiple CPU cores, on computers consisting of many CPU cores connected by different interconnects. An adaptive parallel scheduler is a parallel scheduler that is capable of adjusting its resource allocation decisions based on the current resource usage and demand. Adaptive parallel schedulers that decide the numbers of CPU cores to allocate to a parallel job provide more flexibility and potentially improve performance significantly for both local and grid job scheduling compared to non-adaptive schedulers. A major reason why adaptive schedulers are not yet used practically is due to lack of knowledge of the scalability curves of the applications, and high cost of existing white-box approaches for scalability prediction. We show that a runtime and scalability prediction tool can be developed with 3 requirements: accuracy comparable to white-box methods, applicability, and robustness. Applicability depends only on knowledge feasible to gain in a production environment. Robustness addresses anomalous behaviour and unreliable predictions. We present ADEPT, a speedup and runtime prediction tool that satisfies all criteria for both single problem size and across different problem sizes of a parallel application. ADEPT is also capable of handling anomalies and judging reliability of its predictions. We demonstrate these using experiments with MPI and OpenMP implementations of NAS benchmarks and seven real applications

E-AMOM: An Energy-Aware Modeling and Optimization Methodology for Scientific Applications on Multicore Systems

Power consumption is an important constraint in achieving efficient execution on High Performance Computing Multicore Systems. As the number of cores available on a chip continues to increase, the importance of power consumption will continue to grow. In order to achieve improved performance on multicore systems scientific applications must make use of efficient methods for reducing power consumption and must further be refined to achieve reduced execution time. In this dissertation, we introduce a performance modeling framework, E-AMOM, to enable improved execution of scientific applications on parallel multicore systems with regards to a limited power budget. We develop models for each application based upon performance hardware counters. Our models utilize different performance counters for each application and for each performance component (runtime, system power consumption, CPU power consumption, and memory power consumption) that are selected via our performance-tuned principal component analysis method. Models developed through E-AMOM provide insight into the performance characteristics of each application that affect performance for each component on a parallel multicore system. Our models are more than 92% accurate across both Hybrid (MPI/OpenMP) and MPI implementations for six scientific applications. E-AMOM includes an optimization component that utilizes our models to employ run-time Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) and Dynamic Concurrency Throttling to reduce power consumption of the scientific applications. Further, we optimize our applications based upon insights provided by the performance models to reduce runtime of the applications. Our methods and techniques are able to save up to 18% in energy consumption for Hybrid (MPI/OpenMP) and MPI scientific applications and reduce the runtime of the applications up to 11% on parallel multicore systems