750 research outputs found
TensorFlow Doing HPC
TensorFlow is a popular emerging open-source programming framework supporting
the execution of distributed applications on heterogeneous hardware. While
TensorFlow has been initially designed for developing Machine Learning (ML)
applications, in fact TensorFlow aims at supporting the development of a much
broader range of application kinds that are outside the ML domain and can
possibly include HPC applications. However, very few experiments have been
conducted to evaluate TensorFlow performance when running HPC workloads on
supercomputers. This work addresses this lack by designing four traditional HPC
benchmark applications: STREAM, matrix-matrix multiply, Conjugate Gradient (CG)
solver and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). We analyze their performance on two
supercomputers with accelerators and evaluate the potential of TensorFlow for
developing HPC applications. Our tests show that TensorFlow can fully take
advantage of high performance networks and accelerators on supercomputers.
Running our TensorFlow STREAM benchmark, we obtain over 50% of theoretical
communication bandwidth on our testing platform. We find an approximately 2x,
1.7x and 1.8x performance improvement when increasing the number of GPUs from
two to four in the matrix-matrix multiply, CG and FFT applications
respectively. All our performance results demonstrate that TensorFlow has high
potential of emerging also as HPC programming framework for heterogeneous
supercomputers.Comment: Accepted for publication at The Ninth International Workshop on
Accelerators and Hybrid Exascale Systems (AsHES'19
Scalable Distributed DNN Training using TensorFlow and CUDA-Aware MPI: Characterization, Designs, and Performance Evaluation
TensorFlow has been the most widely adopted Machine/Deep Learning framework.
However, little exists in the literature that provides a thorough understanding
of the capabilities which TensorFlow offers for the distributed training of
large ML/DL models that need computation and communication at scale. Most
commonly used distributed training approaches for TF can be categorized as
follows: 1) Google Remote Procedure Call (gRPC), 2) gRPC+X: X=(InfiniBand
Verbs, Message Passing Interface, and GPUDirect RDMA), and 3) No-gRPC: Baidu
Allreduce with MPI, Horovod with MPI, and Horovod with NVIDIA NCCL. In this
paper, we provide an in-depth performance characterization and analysis of
these distributed training approaches on various GPU clusters including the Piz
Daint system (6 on Top500). We perform experiments to gain novel insights along
the following vectors: 1) Application-level scalability of DNN training, 2)
Effect of Batch Size on scaling efficiency, 3) Impact of the MPI library used
for no-gRPC approaches, and 4) Type and size of DNN architectures. Based on
these experiments, we present two key insights: 1) Overall, No-gRPC designs
achieve better performance compared to gRPC-based approaches for most
configurations, and 2) The performance of No-gRPC is heavily influenced by the
gradient aggregation using Allreduce. Finally, we propose a truly CUDA-Aware
MPI Allreduce design that exploits CUDA kernels and pointer caching to perform
large reductions efficiently. Our proposed designs offer 5-17X better
performance than NCCL2 for small and medium messages, and reduces latency by
29% for large messages. The proposed optimizations help Horovod-MPI to achieve
approximately 90% scaling efficiency for ResNet-50 training on 64 GPUs.
Further, Horovod-MPI achieves 1.8X and 3.2X higher throughput than the native
gRPC method for ResNet-50 and MobileNet, respectively, on the Piz Daint
cluster.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, submitted to IEEE IPDPS 2019 for peer-revie
DALiuGE: A Graph Execution Framework for Harnessing the Astronomical Data Deluge
The Data Activated Liu Graph Engine - DALiuGE - is an execution framework for
processing large astronomical datasets at a scale required by the Square
Kilometre Array Phase 1 (SKA1). It includes an interface for expressing complex
data reduction pipelines consisting of both data sets and algorithmic
components and an implementation run-time to execute such pipelines on
distributed resources. By mapping the logical view of a pipeline to its
physical realisation, DALiuGE separates the concerns of multiple stakeholders,
allowing them to collectively optimise large-scale data processing solutions in
a coherent manner. The execution in DALiuGE is data-activated, where each
individual data item autonomously triggers the processing on itself. Such
decentralisation also makes the execution framework very scalable and flexible,
supporting pipeline sizes ranging from less than ten tasks running on a laptop
to tens of millions of concurrent tasks on the second fastest supercomputer in
the world. DALiuGE has been used in production for reducing interferometry data
sets from the Karl E. Jansky Very Large Array and the Mingantu Ultrawide
Spectral Radioheliograph; and is being developed as the execution framework
prototype for the Science Data Processor (SDP) consortium of the Square
Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope. This paper presents a technical overview of
DALiuGE and discusses case studies from the CHILES and MUSER projects that use
DALiuGE to execute production pipelines. In a companion paper, we provide
in-depth analysis of DALiuGE's scalability to very large numbers of tasks on
two supercomputing facilities.Comment: 31 pages, 12 figures, currently under review by Astronomy and
Computin
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