HPC Accelerators with 3D Memory

Artículo invitado, publicado en las actas del congreso por IEEE Society Press. Páginas 320 a 328. ISBN: 978-1-5090-3593-9.DOI 10.1109/CSE-EUC-DCABES-2016.203After a decade evolving in the High Performance Computing arena, GPU-equipped supercomputers have con- quered the top500 and green500 lists, providing us unprecedented levels of computational power and memory bandwidth. This year, major vendors have introduced new accelerators based on 3D memory, like Xeon Phi Knights Landing by Intel and Pascal architecture by Nvidia. This paper reviews hardware features of those new HPC accelerators and unveils potential performance for scientific applications, with an emphasis on Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) and High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) used by commercial products according to roadmaps already announced.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucia Tec

Programming MPSoC platforms: Road works ahead

This paper summarizes a special session on multicore/multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC) programming challenges. The current trend towards MPSoC platforms in most computing domains does not only mean a radical change in computer architecture. Even more important from a SW developer´s viewpoint, at the same time the classical sequential von Neumann programming model needs to be overcome. Efficient utilization of the MPSoC HW resources demands for radically new models and corresponding SW development tools, capable of exploiting the available parallelism and guaranteeing bug-free parallel SW. While several standards are established in the high-performance computing domain (e.g. OpenMP), it is clear that more innovations are required for successful\ud deployment of heterogeneous embedded MPSoC. On the other hand, at least for coming years, the freedom for disruptive programming technologies is limited by the huge amount of certified sequential code that demands for a more pragmatic, gradual tool and code replacement strategy

이종 멀티 코어 프로세서에서 SDF/L 그래프 스케줄링 기법

학위논문(석사) -- 서울대학교대학원 : 공과대학 컴퓨터공학부, 2021.8. Ha Soonhoi.Although dataflow models are known to thrive at exploiting task-level parallelism of an application, it is difficult to exploit the parallelism of data. Data-level parallelism can be represented well with loop structures, but these structures are not explicitly specified in most existing dataflow models. SDF/L model was introduced to overcome this shortcoming by specifying the loop structures explicitly in a hierarchical fashion. To the best of our knowledge however, scheduling of SDF/L graph onto heterogeneous processors has not been considered in any previous work. In this dissertation, we introduce a scheduling technique of an application represented by the SDF/L model onto heterogeneous processors. In the proposed method, we explore the mapping of tasks using an evolutionary meta-heuristic and schedule hierarchically in a bottom-up fashion, creating parallel loop schedules at lower levels first and then re-using them when constructing the schedule at a higher level. To verify the efficiency of the proposed scheduling methodology, we apply it to benchmark examples and randomly generated SDF/L graphs.데이터플로우 모델은 애플리케이션의 태스크를 병렬 처리할 때 좋은 모델로 알려져 있지만 데이터를 병렬로 처리하는 데에 활용하기는 어렵다. 데이터 수준 병렬 처리는 루프 구조를 통해 표현될 수 있으나 기존 데이터플로우 모델에서 명시적으로 루프 구조는 명세하는 방법이 없었다. 이러한 단점을 극복하기 위해 계층적 구조를 활용하여 루프 구조를 명시적으로 명세할 수 있는 SDF/L 모델이 제안되었다. 그러나 이기종 프로세서에 대한 SDF/L 그래프의 스케줄링은 이전까지 고려되지 않은 것으로 파악된다. 본 논문에서는 SDF/L 모델로 표현되는 애플리케이션을 이기종 프로세서에 대하여 스케줄링하는 기법을 소개한다. 제안된 방법에서는 먼저 진화적 메타 휴리스틱을 사용하여 태스크 매핑을 탐색한다. 이후 하위 수준에서 병렬 루프 스케줄을 만든 다음 상위 수준에서 스케줄 구성할 때 재사용하는 상향식의 계층적 태스크 스케줄링을 수행한다. 제안하는 스케줄링 기법의 효율성을 검증하기 위해 벤치마크 예제와 무작위로 생성된 SDF/L 그래프에 기법을 적용하였다.Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 2 Related Work 6 2.1 SDF Scheduling with Data-level Parallelism 8 2.2 Hierarchical Scheduling 9 Chapter 3 Problem and Challenges 11 3.1 Notations and Problem Description 11 3.2 Challenges 12 Chapter 4 Proposed methodology 15 4.1 Mapping Exploration 15 4.2 Priority Assignment and List Scheduling Heuristic 17 4.3 Hierarchical Scheduling 18 4.4 Complexity 23 Chapter 5 Experiments 24 5.1 Benchmarks 25 5.2 Randomly Generated Graphs 30 Chapter 6 Conclusions 35 Bibliography 37 요 약 41석

Hardware/Software Co-design for Multicore Architectures

Siirretty Doriast

High Performance Computing via High Level Synthesis

As more and more powerful integrated circuits are appearing on the market, more and more applications, with very different requirements and workloads, are making use of the available computing power. This thesis is in particular devoted to High Performance Computing applications, where those trends are carried to the extreme. In this domain, the primary aspects to be taken into consideration are (1) performance (by definition) and (2) energy consumption (since operational costs dominate over procurement costs). These requirements can be satisfied more easily by deploying heterogeneous platforms, which include CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs to provide a broad range of performance and energy-per-operation choices. In particular, as we will see, FPGAs clearly dominate both CPUs and GPUs in terms of energy, and can provide comparable performance. An important aspect of this trend is of course design technology, because these applications were traditionally programmed in high-level languages, while FPGAs required low-level RTL design. The OpenCL (Open Computing Language) developed by the Khronos group enables developers to program CPU, GPU and recently FPGAs using functionally portable (but sadly not performance portable) source code which creates new possibilities and challenges both for research and industry. FPGAs have been always used for mid-size designs and ASIC prototyping thanks to their energy efficient and flexible hardware architecture, but their usage requires hardware design knowledge and laborious design cycles. Several approaches are developed and deployed to address this issue and shorten the gap between software and hardware in FPGA design flow, in order to enable FPGAs to capture a larger portion of the hardware acceleration market in data centers. Moreover, FPGAs usage in data centers is growing already, regardless of and in addition to their use as computational accelerators, because they can be used as high performance, low power and secure switches inside data-centers. High-Level Synthesis (HLS) is the methodology that enables designers to map their applications on FPGAs (and ASICs). It synthesizes parallel hardware from a model originally written C-based programming languages .e.g. C/C++, SystemC and OpenCL. Design space exploration of the variety of implementations that can be obtained from this C model is possible through wide range of optimization techniques and directives, e.g. to pipeline loops and partition memories into multiple banks, which guide RTL generation toward application dependent hardware and benefit designers from flexible parallel architecture of FPGAs. Model Based Design (MBD) is a high-level and visual process used to generate implementations that solve mathematical problems through a varied set of IP-blocks. MBD enables developers with different expertise, e.g. control theory, embedded software development, and hardware design to share a common design framework and contribute to a shared design using the same tool. Simulink, developed by MATLAB, is a model based design tool for simulation and development of complex dynamical systems. Moreover, Simulink embedded code generators can produce verified C/C++ and HDL code from the graphical model. This code can be used to program micro-controllers and FPGAs. This PhD thesis work presents a study using automatic code generator of Simulink to target Xilinx FPGAs using both HDL and C/C++ code to demonstrate capabilities and challenges of high-level synthesis process. To do so, firstly, digital signal processing unit of a real-time radar application is developed using Simulink blocks. Secondly, generated C based model was used for high level synthesis process and finally the implementation cost of HLS is compared to traditional HDL synthesis using Xilinx tool chain. Alternative to model based design approach, this work also presents an analysis on FPGA programming via high-level synthesis techniques for computationally intensive algorithms and demonstrates the importance of HLS by comparing performance-per-watt of GPUs(NVIDIA) and FPGAs(Xilinx) manufactured in the same node running standard OpenCL benchmarks. We conclude that generation of high quality RTL from OpenCL model requires stronger hardware background with respect to the MBD approach, however, the availability of a fast and broad design space exploration ability and portability of the OpenCL code, e.g. to CPUs and GPUs, motivates FPGA industry leaders to provide users with OpenCL software development environment which promises FPGA programming in CPU/GPU-like fashion. Our experiments, through extensive design space exploration(DSE), suggest that FPGAs have higher performance-per-watt with respect to two high-end GPUs manufactured in the same technology(28 nm). Moreover, FPGAs with more available resources and using a more modern process (20 nm) can outperform the tested GPUs while consuming much less power at the cost of more expensive devices

Hardware implementations of computer-generated holography: a review

Computer-generated holography (CGH) is a technique to generate holographic interference patterns. One of the major issues related to computer hologram generation is the massive computational power required. Hardware accelerators are used to accelerate this process. Previous publications targeting hardware platforms lack performance comparisons between different architectures and do not provide enough information for the evaluation of the suitability of recent hardware platforms for CGH algorithms. We aim to address these limitations and present a comprehensive review of CGH-related hardware implementations

Memory Consistency and Cache Coherency in Network-on-Chip Based Multi-Core Systems

The complexity of modern Systems-on-Chips (SoC) is increasing with technology innovations. Designers of such systems are devoting significant attention not only to computation attributes, but increasingly more and more on communications characteristics. Having in mind scalability challenges, Networks-on-Chip (NoC) are already de facto standard for the communication backbone of SoC systems. As such, those systems are targeting more and more parallel execution of user defined, real-time applications, but the computer engineering society aims at hiding underlying platform specific characteristics and providing user with platform-independent services. Shared memory services are quite often a needed crucial property of such systems, therefore providing a coherent view, ensuring memory consistency, and still achieving the desired performance system characteristics is a huge challenge for scientists nowadays. With the invention of 3D integration, and opportunities of stacking memory modules on top of it, the concept of scalable shared memory will be one of the main memory access concepts besides message passing. In this thesis, the concept of a scalable coherency protocol which dynamically adopts to inputs of system and shared resources, is presented. Protocol ingredients, structure and internal modules interaction are described in detail. The conceptual idea of this protocol, influenced by widely accepted best practices in bus based systems as well of other NoC systems, is implemented for one particular type of NoC platform - XhiNoC (extendable Hierarchical Network-on Chip). The feasibility of the presented concept for distributed shared memory (DSM) coherency within NoC-based SoC architectures is confirmed by simulation-based experimental results.The complexity of modern Systems-on-Chips (SoC) is increasing with technology innovations. Designers of such systems are devoting significant attention not only to computation attributes, but increasingly more and more on communications characteristics. Having in mind scalability challenges, Networks-on-Chip (NoC) are already de facto standard for the communication backbone of SoC systems. As such, those systems are targeting more and more parallel execution of user defined, real-time applications, but the computer engineering society aims at hiding underlying platform specific characteristics and providing user with platform-independent services. Shared memory services are quite often a needed crucial property of such systems, therefore providing a coherent view, ensuring memory consistency, and still achieving the desired performance system characteristics is a huge challenge for scientists nowadays. With the invention of 3D integration, and opportunities of stacking memory modules on top of it, the concept of scalable shared memory will be one of the main memory access concepts besides message passing. In this thesis, the concept of a scalable coherency protocol which dynamically adopts to inputs of system and shared resources, is presented. Protocol ingredients, structure and internal modules interaction are described in detail. The conceptual idea of this protocol, influenced by widely accepted best practices in bus based systems as well of other NoC systems, is implemented for one particular type of NoC platform - XhiNoC (extendable Hierarchical Network-on Chip). The feasibility of the presented concept for distributed shared memory (DSM) coherency within NoC-based SoC architectures is confirmed by simulation-based experimental results