Simplifying Dependent Reductions in the Polyhedral Model

A Reduction -- an accumulation over a set of values, using an associative and commutative operator -- is a common computation in many numerical computations, including scientific computations, machine learning, computer vision, and financial analytics. Contemporary polyhedral-based compilation techniques make it possible to optimize reductions, such as prefix sums, in which each component of the reduction's output potentially shares computation with another component in the reduction. Therefore an optimizing compiler can identify the computation shared between multiple components and generate code that computes the shared computation only once. These techniques, however, do not support reductions that -- when phrased in the language of the polyhedral model -- span multiple dependent statements. In such cases, existing approaches can generate incorrect code that violates the data dependences of the original, unoptimized program. In this work, we identify and formalize the optimization of dependent reductions as an integer bilinear program. We present a heuristic optimization algorithm that uses an affine sequential schedule of the program to determine how to simplfy reductions yet still preserve the program's dependences. We demonstrate that the algorithm provides optimal complexity for a set of benchmark programs from the literature on probabilistic inference algorithms, whose performance critically relies on simplifying these reductions. The complexities for 10 of the 11 programs improve siginifcantly by factors at least of the sizes of the input data, which are in the range of $10^4$ to $10^6$ for typical real application inputs. We also confirm the significance of the improvement by showing speedups in wall-clock time that range from $1.1\text{x}$ to over $10^6\text{x}$

Polly's Polyhedral Scheduling in the Presence of Reductions

The polyhedral model provides a powerful mathematical abstraction to enable effective optimization of loop nests with respect to a given optimization goal, e.g., exploiting parallelism. Unexploited reduction properties are a frequent reason for polyhedral optimizers to assume parallelism prohibiting dependences. To our knowledge, no polyhedral loop optimizer available in any production compiler provides support for reductions. In this paper, we show that leveraging the parallelism of reductions can lead to a significant performance increase. We give a precise, dependence based, definition of reductions and discuss ways to extend polyhedral optimization to exploit the associativity and commutativity of reduction computations. We have implemented a reduction-enabled scheduling approach in the Polly polyhedral optimizer and evaluate it on the standard Polybench 3.2 benchmark suite. We were able to detect and model all 52 arithmetic reductions and achieve speedups up to 2.21$\times$ on a quad core machine by exploiting the multidimensional reduction in the BiCG benchmark.Comment: Presented at the IMPACT15 worksho

Beyond shared memory loop parallelism in the polyhedral model

2013 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.With the introduction of multi-core processors, motivated by power and energy concerns, parallel processing has become main-stream. Parallel programming is much more difficult due to its non-deterministic nature, and because of parallel programming bugs that arise from non-determinacy. One solution is automatic parallelization, where it is entirely up to the compiler to efficiently parallelize sequential programs. However, automatic parallelization is very difficult, and only a handful of successful techniques are available, even after decades of research. Automatic parallelization for distributed memory architectures is even more problematic in that it requires explicit handling of data partitioning and communication. Since data must be partitioned among multiple nodes that do not share memory, the original memory allocation of sequential programs cannot be directly used. One of the main contributions of this dissertation is the development of techniques for generating distributed memory parallel code with parametric tiling. Our approach builds on important contributions to the polyhedral model, a mathematical framework for reasoning about program transformations. We show that many affine control programs can be uniformized only with simple techniques. Being able to assume uniform dependences significantly simplifies distributed memory code generation, and also enables parametric tiling. Our approach implemented in the AlphaZ system, a system for prototyping analyses, transformations, and code generators in the polyhedral model. The key features of AlphaZ are memory re-allocation, and explicit representation of reductions. We evaluate our approach on a collection of polyhedral kernels from the PolyBench suite, and show that our approach scales as well as PLuTo, a state-of-the-art shared memory automatic parallelizer using the polyhedral model. Automatic parallelization is only one approach to dealing with the non-deterministic nature of parallel programming that leaves the difficulty entirely to the compiler. Another approach is to develop novel parallel programming languages. These languages, such as X10, aim to provide highly productive parallel programming environment by including parallelism into the language design. However, even in these languages, parallel bugs remain to be an important issue that hinders programmer productivity. Another contribution of this dissertation is to extend the array dataflow analysis to handle a subset of X10 programs. We apply the result of dataflow analysis to statically guarantee determinism. Providing static guarantees can significantly increase programmer productivity by catching questionable implementations at compile-time, or even while programming

Some advances in the polyhedral model

Department Head: L. Darrell Whitley.2010 Summer.Includes bibliographical references.The polyhedral model is a mathematical formalism and a framework for the analysis and transformation of regular computations. It provides a unified approach to the optimization of computations from different application domains. It is now gaining wide use in optimizing compilers and automatic parallelization. In its purest form, it is based on a declarative model where computations are specified as equations over domains defined by "polyhedral sets". This dissertation presents two results. First is an analysis and optimization technique that enables us to simplify---reduce the asymptotic complexity---of such equations. The second is an extension of the model to richer domains called Ƶ-Polyhedra. Many equational specifications in the polyhedral model have reductions---application of an associative and commutative operator to collections of values to produce a collection of answers. Moreover, expressions in such equations may also exhibit reuse where intermediate values that are computed or used at different index points are identical. We develop various compiler transformations to automatically exploit this reuse and simplify the computational complexity of the specification. In general, there is an infinite set of applicable simplification transformations. Unfortunately, different choices may result in equivalent specifications with different asymptotic complexity. We present an algorithm for the optimal application of simplification transformations resulting in a final specification with minimum complexity. This dissertation also presents the Ƶ-Polyhedral model, an extension to the polyhedral model to more general sets, thereby providing a transformation framework for a larger set of regular computations. For this, we present a novel representation and interpretation of Ƶ-Polyhedra and prove a number of properties of the family of unions of Ƶ-Polyhedra that are required to extend the polyhedral model. Finally, we present value based dependence analysis and scheduling analysis for specifications in the Ƶ-Polyhedral model. These are direct extensions of the corresponding analyses of specifications in the polyhedral model. One of the benefits of our results in the Ƶ-Polyhedral model is that our abstraction allows the reuse of previously developed tools in the polyhedral model with straightforward pre- and post-processing

Code generation in AlphaZ

2011 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.Computer architecture technology is evolving rapidly. Many of the programs written for a specific architecture are not very useful when a new architecture evolves. They have to be either modified or rewritten to suit the new architectures. Instead one can write a high level program and feed this to a tool which can produce code for different architectures. AlphaZ is such a tool which takes a high level program and helps us to analyze, transform and generate code for different architectures. In this thesis, we develop a code generation framework in AlphaZ, which takes equations as programs called alphabets program. Alphabets is a high level abstraction language which allows us to write equational programs. Equational programs consists of a set of equations along with their associated domains. We describe how code is generated in our code generation framework by taking an Alphabets program and the necessary target mapping specification. We illustrate how different code generators can be developed by extending the existing modules in our code generation framework

Tools for efficient Deep Learning

In the era of Deep Learning (DL), there is a fast-growing demand for building and deploying Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on various platforms. This thesis proposes five tools to address the challenges for designing DNNs that are efficient in time, in resources and in power consumption. We first present Aegis and SPGC to address the challenges in improving the memory efficiency of DL training and inference. Aegis makes mixed precision training (MPT) stabler by layer-wise gradient scaling. Empirical experiments show that Aegis can improve MPT accuracy by at most 4\%. SPGC focuses on structured pruning: replacing standard convolution with group convolution (GConv) to avoid irregular sparsity. SPGC formulates GConv pruning as a channel permutation problem and proposes a novel heuristic polynomial-time algorithm. Common DNNs pruned by SPGC have maximally 1\% higher accuracy than prior work. This thesis also addresses the challenges lying in the gap between DNN descriptions and executables by Polygeist for software and POLSCA for hardware. Many novel techniques, e.g. statement splitting and memory partitioning, are explored and used to expand polyhedral optimisation. Polygeist can speed up software execution in sequential and parallel by 2.53 and 9.47 times on Polybench/C. POLSCA achieves 1.5 times speedup over hardware designs directly generated from high-level synthesis on Polybench/C. Moreover, this thesis presents Deacon, a framework that generates FPGA-based DNN accelerators of streaming architectures with advanced pipelining techniques to address the challenges from heterogeneous convolution and residual connections. Deacon provides fine-grained pipelining, graph-level optimisation, and heuristic exploration by graph colouring. Compared with prior designs, Deacon shows resource/power consumption efficiency improvement of 1.2x/3.5x for MobileNets and 1.0x/2.8x for SqueezeNets. All these tools are open source, some of which have already gained public engagement. We believe they can make efficient deep learning applications easier to build and deploy.Open Acces

Polyhedral+Dataflow Graphs

This research presents an intermediate compiler representation that is designed for optimization, and emphasizes the temporary storage requirements and execution schedule of a given computation to guide optimization decisions. The representation is expressed as a dataflow graph that describes computational statements and data mappings within the polyhedral compilation model. The targeted applications include both the regular and irregular scientific domains. The intermediate representation can be integrated into existing compiler infrastructures. A specification language implemented as a domain specific language in C++ describes the graph components and the transformations that can be applied. The visual representation allows users to reason about optimizations. Graph variants can be translated into source code or other representation. The language, intermediate representation, and associated transformations have been applied to improve the performance of differential equation solvers, or sparse matrix operations, tensor decomposition, and structured multigrid methods