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

Non regression testing for the JOREK code

Non Regression Testing (NRT) aims to check if software modifications result in undesired behaviour. Suppose the behaviour of the application previously known, this kind of test makes it possible to identify an eventual regression, a bug. Improving and tuning a parallel code can be a time-consuming and difficult task, especially whenever people from different scientific fields interact closely. The JOREK code aims at investing Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities in a Tokamak plasma. This paper describes the NRT procedure that has been tuned for this simulation code. Automation of the NRT is one keypoint to keeping the code healthy in a source code repository.Comment: No. RR-8134 (2012

Reproducibility, accuracy and performance of the Feltor code and library on parallel computer architectures

Feltor is a modular and free scientific software package. It allows developing platform independent code that runs on a variety of parallel computer architectures ranging from laptop CPUs to multi-GPU distributed memory systems. Feltor consists of both a numerical library and a collection of application codes built on top of the library. Its main target are two- and three-dimensional drift- and gyro-fluid simulations with discontinuous Galerkin methods as the main numerical discretization technique. We observe that numerical simulations of a recently developed gyro-fluid model produce non-deterministic results in parallel computations. First, we show how we restore accuracy and bitwise reproducibility algorithmically and programmatically. In particular, we adopt an implementation of the exactly rounded dot product based on long accumulators, which avoids accuracy losses especially in parallel applications. However, reproducibility and accuracy alone fail to indicate correct simulation behaviour. In fact, in the physical model slightly different initial conditions lead to vastly different end states. This behaviour translates to its numerical representation. Pointwise convergence, even in principle, becomes impossible for long simulation times. In a second part, we explore important performance tuning considerations. We identify latency and memory bandwidth as the main performance indicators of our routines. Based on these, we propose a parallel performance model that predicts the execution time of algorithms implemented in Feltor and test our model on a selection of parallel hardware architectures. We are able to predict the execution time with a relative error of less than 25% for problem sizes between 0.1 and 1000 MB. Finally, we find that the product of latency and bandwidth gives a minimum array size per compute node to achieve a scaling efficiency above 50% (both strong and weak)

Tiramisu: A Polyhedral Compiler for Expressing Fast and Portable Code

This paper introduces Tiramisu, a polyhedral framework designed to generate high performance code for multiple platforms including multicores, GPUs, and distributed machines. Tiramisu introduces a scheduling language with novel extensions to explicitly manage the complexities that arise when targeting these systems. The framework is designed for the areas of image processing, stencils, linear algebra and deep learning. Tiramisu has two main features: it relies on a flexible representation based on the polyhedral model and it has a rich scheduling language allowing fine-grained control of optimizations. Tiramisu uses a four-level intermediate representation that allows full separation between the algorithms, loop transformations, data layouts, and communication. This separation simplifies targeting multiple hardware architectures with the same algorithm. We evaluate Tiramisu by writing a set of image processing, deep learning, and linear algebra benchmarks and compare them with state-of-the-art compilers and hand-tuned libraries. We show that Tiramisu matches or outperforms existing compilers and libraries on different hardware architectures, including multicore CPUs, GPUs, and distributed machines.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1803.0041

Parallelizing the QUDA Library for Multi-GPU Calculations in Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are having a transformational effect on numerical lattice quantum chromodynamics (LQCD) calculations of importance in nuclear and particle physics. The QUDA library provides a package of mixed precision sparse matrix linear solvers for LQCD applications, supporting single GPUs based on NVIDIA's Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). This library, interfaced to the QDP++/Chroma framework for LQCD calculations, is currently in production use on the "9g" cluster at the Jefferson Laboratory, enabling unprecedented price/performance for a range of problems in LQCD. Nevertheless, memory constraints on current GPU devices limit the problem sizes that can be tackled. In this contribution we describe the parallelization of the QUDA library onto multiple GPUs using MPI, including strategies for the overlapping of communication and computation. We report on both weak and strong scaling for up to 32 GPUs interconnected by InfiniBand, on which we sustain in excess of 4 Tflops.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, to appear in the Proceedings of Supercomputing 2010 (submitted April 12, 2010

Peachy Parallel Assignments (EduHPC 2018)

Peachy Parallel Assignments are a resource for instructors teaching parallel and distributed programming. These are high-quality assignments, previously tested in class, that are readily adoptable. This collection of assignments includes implementing a subset of OpenMP using pthreads, creating an animated fractal, image processing using histogram equalization, simulating a storm of high-energy particles, and solving the wave equation in a variety of settings. All of these come with sample assignment sheets and the necessary starter code.Departamento de Informática (Arquitectura y Tecnología de Computadores, Ciencias de la Computación e Inteligencia Artificial, Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos)Facilitar la inclusión de ejercicios prácticos de programación paralela en cursos de Computación Paralela o de alto rendimiento (HPC)Comunicación en congreso: Descripción de ejercicios prácticos con acceso a material ya desarrollado y probado