Tuning and optimization for a variety of many-core architectures without changing a single line of implementation code using the Alpaka library

We present an analysis on optimizing performance of a single C++11 source code using the Alpaka hardware abstraction library. For this we use the general matrix multiplication (GEMM) algorithm in order to show that compilers can optimize Alpaka code effectively when tuning key parameters of the algorithm. We do not intend to rival existing, highly optimized DGEMM versions, but merely choose this example to prove that Alpaka allows for platform-specific tuning with a single source code. In addition we analyze the optimization potential available with vendor-specific compilers when confronted with the heavily templated abstractions of Alpaka. We specifically test the code for bleeding edge architectures such as Nvidia's Tesla P100, Intel's Knights Landing (KNL) and Haswell architecture as well as IBM's Power8 system. On some of these we are able to reach almost 50\% of the peak floating point operation performance using the aforementioned means. When adding compiler-specific #pragmas we are able to reach 5 TFLOPS/s on a P100 and over 1 TFLOPS/s on a KNL system.Comment: Accepted paper for the P\^{}3MA workshop at the ISC 2017 in Frankfur

Evaluating Portable Parallelization Strategies for Heterogeneous Architectures in High Energy Physics

High-energy physics (HEP) experiments have developed millions of lines of code over decades that are optimized to run on traditional x86 CPU systems. However, we are seeing a rapidly increasing fraction of floating point computing power in leadership-class computing facilities and traditional data centers coming from new accelerator architectures, such as GPUs. HEP experiments are now faced with the untenable prospect of rewriting millions of lines of x86 CPU code, for the increasingly dominant architectures found in these computational accelerators. This task is made more challenging by the architecture-specific languages and APIs promoted by manufacturers such as NVIDIA, Intel and AMD. Producing multiple, architecture-specific implementations is not a viable scenario, given the available person power and code maintenance issues. The Portable Parallelization Strategies team of the HEP Center for Computational Excellence is investigating the use of Kokkos, SYCL, OpenMP, std::execution::parallel and alpaka as potential portability solutions that promise to execute on multiple architectures from the same source code, using representative use cases from major HEP experiments, including the DUNE experiment of the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility, and the ATLAS and CMS experiments of the Large Hadron Collider. This cross-cutting evaluation of portability solutions using real applications will help inform and guide the HEP community when choosing their software and hardware suites for the next generation of experimental frameworks. We present the outcomes of our studies, including performance metrics, porting challenges, API evaluations, and build system integration.Comment: 18 pages, 9 Figures, 2 Table

Supercomputing Frontiers

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th Asian Conference Supercomputing Conference, SCFA 2022, which took place in Singapore in March 2022. The 8 full papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions. They cover a range of topics including file systems, memory hierarchy, HPC cloud platform, container image configuration workflow, large-scale applications, and scheduling

Scalable Applications on Heterogeneous System Architectures: A Systematic Performance Analysis Framework

The efficient parallel execution of scientific applications is a key challenge in high-performance computing (HPC). With growing parallelism and heterogeneity of compute resources as well as increasingly complex software, performance analysis has become an indispensable tool in the development and optimization of parallel programs. This thesis presents a framework for systematic performance analysis of scalable, heterogeneous applications. Based on event traces, it automatically detects the critical path and inefficiencies that result in waiting or idle time, e.g. due to load imbalances between parallel execution streams. As a prerequisite for the analysis of heterogeneous programs, this thesis specifies inefficiency patterns for computation offloading. Furthermore, an essential contribution was made to the development of tool interfaces for OpenACC and OpenMP, which enable a portable data acquisition and a subsequent analysis for programs with offload directives. At present, these interfaces are already part of the latest OpenACC and OpenMP API specification. The aforementioned work, existing preliminary work, and established analysis methods are combined into a generic analysis process, which can be applied across programming models. Based on the detection of wait or idle states, which can propagate over several levels of parallelism, the analysis identifies wasted computing resources and their root cause as well as the critical-path share for each program region. Thus, it determines the influence of program regions on the load balancing between execution streams and the program runtime. The analysis results include a summary of the detected inefficiency patterns and a program trace, enhanced with information about wait states, their cause, and the critical path. In addition, a ranking, based on the amount of waiting time a program region caused on the critical path, highlights program regions that are relevant for program optimization. The scalability of the proposed performance analysis and its implementation is demonstrated using High-Performance Linpack (HPL), while the analysis results are validated with synthetic programs. A scientific application that uses MPI, OpenMP, and CUDA simultaneously is investigated in order to show the applicability of the analysis

Software for Exascale Computing - SPPEXA 2016-2019

This open access book summarizes the research done and results obtained in the second funding phase of the Priority Program 1648 "Software for Exascale Computing" (SPPEXA) of the German Research Foundation (DFG) presented at the SPPEXA Symposium in Dresden during October 21-23, 2019. In that respect, it both represents a continuation of Vol. 113 in Springer’s series Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering, the corresponding report of SPPEXA’s first funding phase, and provides an overview of SPPEXA’s contributions towards exascale computing in today's sumpercomputer technology. The individual chapters address one or more of the research directions (1) computational algorithms, (2) system software, (3) application software, (4) data management and exploration, (5) programming, and (6) software tools. The book has an interdisciplinary appeal: scholars from computational sub-fields in computer science, mathematics, physics, or engineering will find it of particular interest

Heterogeneity-Aware Placement Strategies for Query Optimization

Computing hardware is changing from systems with homogeneous CPUs to systems with heterogeneous computing units like GPUs, Many Integrated Cores, or FPGAs. This trend is caused by scaling problems of homogeneous systems, where heat dissipation and energy consumption is limiting further growths in compute-performance. Heterogeneous systems provide differently optimized computing hardware, which allows different operations to be computed on the most appropriate computing unit, resulting in faster execution and less energy consumption. For database systems, this is a new opportunity to accelerate query processing, allowing faster and more interactive querying of large amounts of data. However, the current hardware trend is also a challenge as most database systems do not support heterogeneous computing resources and it is not clear how to support these systems best. In the past, mainly single operators were ported to different computing units showing great results, while missing a system wide application. To efficiently support heterogeneous systems, a systems approach for query processing and query optimization is needed. In this thesis, we tackle the optimization challenge in detail. As a starting point, we evaluate three different approaches on isolated use-cases to assess their advantages and limitations. First, we evaluate a fork-join approach of intra-operator parallelism, where the same operator is executed on multiple computing units at the same time, each execution with different data partitions. Second, we evaluate using one computing unit statically to accelerate one operator, which provides high code-optimization potential, due to this static and pre-known usage of hardware and software. Third, we evaluate dynamically placing operators onto computing units, depending on the operator, the available computing hardware, and the given data sizes. We argue that the first and second approach suffer from multiple overheads or high implementation costs. The third approach, dynamic placement, shows good performance, while being highly extensible to different computing units and different operator implementations. To automate this dynamic approach, we first propose general placement optimization for query processing. This general approach includes runtime estimation of operators on different computing units as well as two approaches for defining the actual operator placement according to the estimated runtimes. The two placement approaches are local optimization, which decides the placement locally at run-time, and global optimization, where the placement is decided at compile-time, while allowing a global view for enhanced data sharing. The main limitation of the latter is the high dependency on cardinality estimation of intermediate results, as estimation errors for the cardinalities propagate to the operator runtime estimation and placement optimization. Therefore, we propose adaptive placement optimization, allowing the placement optimization to become fully independent of cardinalities estimation, effectively eliminating the main source of inaccuracy for runtime estimation and placement optimization. Finally, we define an adaptive placement sequence, incorporating all our proposed techniques of placement optimization. We implement this sequence as a virtualization layer between the database system and the heterogeneous hardware. Our implementation approach bases on preexisting interfaces to the database system and the hardware, allowing non-intrusive integration into existing database systems. We evaluate our techniques using two different database systems and two different OLAP benchmarks, accelerating the query processing through heterogeneous execution