1,326 research outputs found
The Potential of Synergistic Static, Dynamic and Speculative Loop Nest Optimizations for Automatic Parallelization
Research in automatic parallelization of loop-centric programs started with
static analysis, then broadened its arsenal to include dynamic
inspection-execution and speculative execution, the best results involving
hybrid static-dynamic schemes. Beyond the detection of parallelism in a
sequential program, scalable parallelization on many-core processors involves
hard and interesting parallelism adaptation and mapping challenges. These
challenges include tailoring data locality to the memory hierarchy, structuring
independent tasks hierarchically to exploit multiple levels of parallelism,
tuning the synchronization grain, balancing the execution load, decoupling the
execution into thread-level pipelines, and leveraging heterogeneous hardware
with specialized accelerators. The polyhedral framework allows to model,
construct and apply very complex loop nest transformations addressing most of
the parallelism adaptation and mapping challenges. But apart from
hardware-specific, back-end oriented transformations (if-conversion, trace
scheduling, value prediction), loop nest optimization has essentially ignored
dynamic and speculative techniques. Research in polyhedral compilation recently
reached a significant milestone towards the support of dynamic, data-dependent
control flow. This opens a large avenue for blending dynamic analyses and
speculative techniques with advanced loop nest optimizations. Selecting
real-world examples from SPEC benchmarks and numerical kernels, we make a case
for the design of synergistic static, dynamic and speculative loop
transformation techniques. We also sketch the embedding of dynamic information,
including speculative assumptions, in the heart of affine transformation search
spaces
A Comparative Analysis of STM Approaches to Reduction Operations in Irregular Applications
As a recently consolidated paradigm for optimistic concurrency in modern multicore architectures, Transactional Memory (TM)
can help to the exploitation of parallelism in irregular applications when data dependence information is not available up to run-
time. This paper presents and discusses how to leverage TM to exploit parallelism in an important class of irregular applications, the class that exhibits irregular reduction patterns. In order to test and compare our techniques with other solutions, they were implemented in a software TM system called ReduxSTM, that acts as a proof of concept. Basically, ReduxSTM combines two major ideas: a sequential-equivalent ordering of transaction commits that assures the correct result, and an extension of the underlying TM privatization mechanism to reduce unnecessary overhead due to reduction memory updates as well as unnecesary aborts and rollbacks. A comparative study of STM solutions, including ReduxSTM, and other more classical approaches to the parallelization of reduction operations is presented in terms of time, memory and overhead.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional AndalucĂa Tech
Parallel symbolic state-space exploration is difficult, but what is the alternative?
State-space exploration is an essential step in many modeling and analysis
problems. Its goal is to find the states reachable from the initial state of a
discrete-state model described. The state space can used to answer important
questions, e.g., "Is there a dead state?" and "Can N become negative?", or as a
starting point for sophisticated investigations expressed in temporal logic.
Unfortunately, the state space is often so large that ordinary explicit data
structures and sequential algorithms cannot cope, prompting the exploration of
(1) parallel approaches using multiple processors, from simple workstation
networks to shared-memory supercomputers, to satisfy large memory and runtime
requirements and (2) symbolic approaches using decision diagrams to encode the
large structured sets and relations manipulated during state-space generation.
Both approaches have merits and limitations. Parallel explicit state-space
generation is challenging, but almost linear speedup can be achieved; however,
the analysis is ultimately limited by the memory and processors available.
Symbolic methods are a heuristic that can efficiently encode many, but not all,
functions over a structured and exponentially large domain; here the pitfalls
are subtler: their performance varies widely depending on the class of decision
diagram chosen, the state variable order, and obscure algorithmic parameters.
As symbolic approaches are often much more efficient than explicit ones for
many practical models, we argue for the need to parallelize symbolic
state-space generation algorithms, so that we can realize the advantage of both
approaches. This is a challenging endeavor, as the most efficient symbolic
algorithm, Saturation, is inherently sequential. We conclude by discussing
challenges, efforts, and promising directions toward this goal
Factoring out ordered sections to expose thread-level parallelism
With the rise of multi-core processors, researchers are taking a new look at extending the applicability auto-parallelization techniques. In this paper, we identify a dependence pattern on which autoparallelization currently fails. This dependence pattern occurs for ordered sections, i.e. code fragments in a loop that must be executed atomically and in original program order. We discuss why these ordered sections prohibit current auto-parallelizers from working and we present a technique to deal with them. We experimentally demonstrate the efficacy of the technique, yielding significant overall program speedups
Programming agent-based demographic models with cross-state and message-exchange dependencies: A study with speculative PDES and automatic load-sharing
Agent-based modeling and simulation is a versatile and promising methodology to capture complex interactions among entities and their surrounding environment. A great advantage is its ability to model phenomena at a macro scale by exploiting simpler descriptions at a micro level. It has been proven effective in many fields, and it is rapidly becoming a de-facto standard in the study of population dynamics. In this article we study programmability and performance aspects of the last-generation ROOT-Sim speculative PDES environment for multi/many-core shared-memory architectures. ROOT-Sim transparently offers a programming model where interactions can be based on both explicit message passing and in-place state accesses. We introduce programming guidelines for systematic exploitation of these facilities in agent-based simulations, and we study the effects on performance of an innovative load-sharing policy targeting these types of dependencies. An experimental assessment with synthetic and real-world applications is provided, to assess the validity of our proposal
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