31,326 research outputs found
Learning from the Success of MPI
The Message Passing Interface (MPI) has been extremely successful as a
portable way to program high-performance parallel computers. This success has
occurred in spite of the view of many that message passing is difficult and
that other approaches, including automatic parallelization and directive-based
parallelism, are easier to use. This paper argues that MPI has succeeded
because it addresses all of the important issues in providing a parallel
programming model.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur
SPH-EXA: Enhancing the Scalability of SPH codes Via an Exascale-Ready SPH Mini-App
Numerical simulations of fluids in astrophysics and computational fluid
dynamics (CFD) are among the most computationally-demanding calculations, in
terms of sustained floating-point operations per second, or FLOP/s. It is
expected that these numerical simulations will significantly benefit from the
future Exascale computing infrastructures, that will perform 10^18 FLOP/s. The
performance of the SPH codes is, in general, adversely impacted by several
factors, such as multiple time-stepping, long-range interactions, and/or
boundary conditions. In this work an extensive study of three SPH
implementations SPHYNX, ChaNGa, and XXX is performed, to gain insights and to
expose any limitations and characteristics of the codes. These codes are the
starting point of an interdisciplinary co-design project, SPH-EXA, for the
development of an Exascale-ready SPH mini-app. We implemented a rotating square
patch as a joint test simulation for the three SPH codes and analyzed their
performance on a modern HPC system, Piz Daint. The performance profiling and
scalability analysis conducted on the three parent codes allowed to expose
their performance issues, such as load imbalance, both in MPI and OpenMP.
Two-level load balancing has been successfully applied to SPHYNX to overcome
its load imbalance. The performance analysis shapes and drives the design of
the SPH-EXA mini-app towards the use of efficient parallelization methods,
fault-tolerance mechanisms, and load balancing approaches.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1809.0801
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Preparing sparse solvers for exascale computing.
Sparse solvers provide essential functionality for a wide variety of scientific applications. Highly parallel sparse solvers are essential for continuing advances in high-fidelity, multi-physics and multi-scale simulations, especially as we target exascale platforms. This paper describes the challenges, strategies and progress of the US Department of Energy Exascale Computing project towards providing sparse solvers for exascale computing platforms. We address the demands of systems with thousands of high-performance node devices where exposing concurrency, hiding latency and creating alternative algorithms become essential. The efforts described here are works in progress, highlighting current success and upcoming challenges. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Numerical algorithms for high-performance computational science'
Design and optimization of a portable LQCD Monte Carlo code using OpenACC
The present panorama of HPC architectures is extremely heterogeneous, ranging
from traditional multi-core CPU processors, supporting a wide class of
applications but delivering moderate computing performance, to many-core GPUs,
exploiting aggressive data-parallelism and delivering higher performances for
streaming computing applications. In this scenario, code portability (and
performance portability) become necessary for easy maintainability of
applications; this is very relevant in scientific computing where code changes
are very frequent, making it tedious and prone to error to keep different code
versions aligned. In this work we present the design and optimization of a
state-of-the-art production-level LQCD Monte Carlo application, using the
directive-based OpenACC programming model. OpenACC abstracts parallel
programming to a descriptive level, relieving programmers from specifying how
codes should be mapped onto the target architecture. We describe the
implementation of a code fully written in OpenACC, and show that we are able to
target several different architectures, including state-of-the-art traditional
CPUs and GPUs, with the same code. We also measure performance, evaluating the
computing efficiency of our OpenACC code on several architectures, comparing
with GPU-specific implementations and showing that a good level of
performance-portability can be reached.Comment: 26 pages, 2 png figures, preprint of an article submitted for
consideration in International Journal of Modern Physics
A compiler approach to scalable concurrent program design
The programmer's most powerful tool for controlling complexity in program design is abstraction. We seek to use abstraction in the design of concurrent programs, so as to
separate design decisions concerned with decomposition, communication, synchronization, mapping, granularity, and load balancing. This paper describes programming and compiler techniques intended to facilitate this design strategy. The programming techniques are based on a core programming notation with two important properties: the ability to separate concurrent programming concerns, and extensibility with reusable programmer-defined
abstractions. The compiler techniques are based on a simple transformation system together with a set of compilation transformations and portable run-time support. The
transformation system allows programmer-defined abstractions to be defined as source-to-source transformations that convert abstractions into the core notation. The same
transformation system is used to apply compilation transformations that incrementally transform the core notation toward an abstract concurrent machine. This machine can be implemented on a variety of concurrent architectures using simple run-time support.
The transformation, compilation, and run-time system techniques have been implemented and are incorporated in a public-domain program development toolkit. This
toolkit operates on a wide variety of networked workstations, multicomputers, and shared-memory
multiprocessors. It includes a program transformer, concurrent compiler, syntax checker, debugger, performance analyzer, and execution animator. A variety of substantial
applications have been developed using the toolkit, in areas such as climate modeling and fluid dynamics
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