Easing parallel programming on heterogeneous systems

El modo más frecuente de resolver aplicaciones de HPC (High performance Computing) en tiempos de ejecución razonables y de una forma escalable es mediante el uso de sistemas de cómputo paralelo. La tendencia actual en los sistemas de HPC es la inclusión en la misma máquina de ejecución de varios dispositivos de cómputo, de diferente tipo y arquitectura. Sin embargo, su uso impone al programador retos específicos. Un programador debe ser experto en las herramientas y abstracciones existentes para memoria distribuida, los modelos de programación para sistemas de memoria compartida, y los modelos de programación específicos para para cada tipo de co-procesador, con el fin de crear programas híbridos que puedan explotar eficientemente todas las capacidades de la máquina. Actualmente, todos estos problemas deben ser resueltos por el programador, haciendo así la programación de una máquina heterogénea un auténtico reto. Esta Tesis trata varios de los problemas principales relacionados con la programación en paralelo de los sistemas altamente heterogéneos y distribuidos. En ella se realizan propuestas que resuelven problemas que van desde la creación de códigos portables entre diferentes tipos de dispositivos, aceleradores, y arquitecturas, consiguiendo a su vez máxima eficiencia, hasta los problemas que aparecen en los sistemas de memoria distribuida relacionados con las comunicaciones y la partición de estructuras de datosDepartamento de Informática (Arquitectura y Tecnología de Computadores, Ciencias de la Computación e Inteligencia Artificial, Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos)Doctorado en Informátic

Using shared-data localization to reduce the cost of inspector-execution in unified-parallel-C programs

Programs written in the Unified Parallel C (UPC) language can access any location of the entire local and remote address space via read/write operations. However, UPC programs that contain fine-grained shared accesses can exhibit performance degradation. One solution is to use the inspector-executor technique to coalesce fine-grained shared accesses to larger remote access operations. A straightforward implementation of the inspector executor transformation results in excessive instrumentation that hinders performance.; This paper addresses this issue and introduces various techniques that aim at reducing the generated instrumentation code: a shared-data localization transformation based on Constant-Stride Linear Memory Descriptors (CSLMADs) [S. Aarseth, Gravitational N-Body Simulations: Tools and Algorithms, Cambridge Monographs on Mathematical Physics, Cambridge University Press, 2003.], the inlining of data locality checks and the usage of an index vector to aggregate the data. Finally, the paper introduces a lightweight loop code motion transformation to privatize shared scalars that were propagated through the loop body.; A performance evaluation, using up to 2048 cores of a POWER 775, explores the impact of each optimization and characterizes the overheads of UPC programs. It also shows that the presented optimizations increase performance of UPC programs up to 1.8 x their UPC hand-optimized counterpart for applications with regular accesses and up to 6.3 x for applications with irregular accesses.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Compiling for parallel multithreaded computation on symmetric multiprocessors

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1998.Includes bibliographical references (p. 145-149).by Andrew Shaw.Ph.D

An implementation of SISAL for distributed-memory architectures

This thesis describes a new implementation of the implicitly parallel functional programming language SISAL, for massively parallel processor supercomputers. The Optimizing SISAL Compiler (OSC), developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, was originally designed for shared-memory multiprocessor machines and has been adapted to distributed-memory architectures. OSC has been relatively portable between shared-memory architectures, because they are architecturally similar, and OSC generates portable C code. However, distributed-memory architectures are not standardized -- each has a different programming model. Distributed-memory SISAL depends on a layer of software that provides a portable, distributed, shared-memory abstraction. This layer is provided by Split-C, a dialect of the C programming language developed at U.C. Berkeley, which has demonstrated good performance on distributed-memory architectures. Split-C provides important capabilities for good performance: support for program-specific distributed data structures, and split-phase memory operations. Distributed data structures help achieve good memory locality, while split-phase memory operations help tolerate the longer communication latencies inherent in distributed-memory architectures. The distributed-memory SISAL compiler and run-time system takes advantage of these capabilities. The results of these efforts is a compiler that runs identically on the Thinking Machines Connection Machine (CM-5), and the Meiko Computing Surface (CS-2)

Macroservers: An Execution Model for DRAM Processor-In-Memory Arrays

The emergence of semiconductor fabrication technology allowing a tight coupling between high-density DRAM and CMOS logic on the same chip has led to the important new class of Processor-In-Memory (PIM) architectures. Newer developments provide powerful parallel processing capabilities on the chip, exploiting the facility to load wide words in single memory accesses and supporting complex address manipulations in the memory. Furthermore, large arrays of PIMs can be arranged into a massively parallel architecture. In this report, we describe an object-based programming model based on the notion of a macroserver. Macroservers encapsulate a set of variables and methods; threads, spawned by the activation of methods, operate asynchronously on the variables' state space. Data distributions provide a mechanism for mapping large data structures across the memory region of a macroserver, while work distributions allow explicit control of bindings between threads and data. Both data and work distributuions are first-class objects of the model, supporting the dynamic management of data and threads in memory. This offers the flexibility required for fully exploiting the processing power and memory bandwidth of a PIM array, in particular for irregular and adaptive applications. Thread synchronization is based on atomic methods, condition variables, and futures. A special type of lightweight macroserver allows the formulation of flexible scheduling strategies for the access to resources, using a monitor-like mechanism