A Unified Optimization Approach for Sparse Tensor Operations on GPUs

Sparse tensors appear in many large-scale applications with multidimensional and sparse data. While multidimensional sparse data often need to be processed on manycore processors, attempts to develop highly-optimized GPU-based implementations of sparse tensor operations are rare. The irregular computation patterns and sparsity structures as well as the large memory footprints of sparse tensor operations make such implementations challenging. We leverage the fact that sparse tensor operations share similar computation patterns to propose a unified tensor representation called F-COO. Combined with GPU-specific optimizations, F-COO provides highly-optimized implementations of sparse tensor computations on GPUs. The performance of the proposed unified approach is demonstrated for tensor-based kernels such as the Sparse Matricized Tensor- Times-Khatri-Rao Product (SpMTTKRP) and the Sparse Tensor- Times-Matrix Multiply (SpTTM) and is used in tensor decomposition algorithms. Compared to state-of-the-art work we improve the performance of SpTTM and SpMTTKRP up to 3.7 and 30.6 times respectively on NVIDIA Titan-X GPUs. We implement a CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition and achieve up to 14.9 times speedup using the unified method over state-of-the-art libraries on NVIDIA Titan-X GPUs

Sympiler: Transforming Sparse Matrix Codes by Decoupling Symbolic Analysis

Sympiler is a domain-specific code generator that optimizes sparse matrix computations by decoupling the symbolic analysis phase from the numerical manipulation stage in sparse codes. The computation patterns in sparse numerical methods are guided by the input sparsity structure and the sparse algorithm itself. In many real-world simulations, the sparsity pattern changes little or not at all. Sympiler takes advantage of these properties to symbolically analyze sparse codes at compile-time and to apply inspector-guided transformations that enable applying low-level transformations to sparse codes. As a result, the Sympiler-generated code outperforms highly-optimized matrix factorization codes from commonly-used specialized libraries, obtaining average speedups over Eigen and CHOLMOD of 3.8X and 1.5X respectively.Comment: 12 page

Recent advances on happiness

Happiness plays essential role on building prosperity and success in any society. Happiness is one of the essential factors to reach prosperity and success in people’s life and jobs but happiness is not always the same as capability, but they may be correlated while capability is a necessary for having a happy life and happiness feeds back on capability in different ways. People who feel happy could better contribute to society and help other people build better future. This study performs a review on recently completed studies on factors, which influence happiness, new definitions of happiness. The study concentrates more on empirical investigations on the concept of happiness

Therapeutic Effects of Adrenocorticotropic Hormone ACTH in Children with Severely Intractable Seizure

How to Cite This Article: Nasiri J, Sarajan A, Salari M, Sedghi M. Therapeutic Effects of Adrenocorticotropic Hormone ACTH in Children withSeverely Intractable Seizure. Iran J Child Neurol. Summer 2017; 11(3):19-26.AbstractObjectiveTreatment of intractable seizures other than spasms is difficult and controversial.There are few studies on efficacy of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) in treatment of patients with intractable seizure.Materials & MethodsTwenty-five patients with intractable seizure other than spasm including 14 boys and 11 girls with median age of 58 months referred to university clinics of Pediatric Neurology in Isfahan, Iran, during 2014-2015 were prospectively investigated. ACTH was administrated according to our protocol. All cases were followed regularly and assessed for response to treatment and probable side effects, 3 wk after beginning of ACTH therapy and three months after the ACTH therapy. EEG finding were recorded before and three months after the end of ACTH therapy. Statistical analysis using Freidman test and Wilcoxon signed – rank test were performed in order to compare seizure frequency and EEG changes, respectively.ResultsMean A significant reduction (>80%) in seizure frequency in 11 cases (44%) and moderate reduction (50%-80%) in 7 (28%) after 3 wk of ACTH therapy.Despite initial positive response, recurrence of seizure was observed in 7 out of 18 cases with favorable initial response within 3 months after ACTH therapy cessation. The comparison of EEG finding before and 3 months after ACTH therapy using Wilcoxon signed – rank test showed  significant differences.ConclusionACTH therapy may be useful in treatment of children with intractable seizures who are resistant to usual antiepileptic drugs. However further studies should be performed to determine the long-term efficacy of ACTH in treatment of intractable seizure.References1. Dunin-Wąsowicz D, Mazurkiewicz-Bełdzińska M, Steinborn B, Wheless J, Jóźwiak S. Treatment of pediatric epilepsy in Poland. Eur J Paediatr Neurol 2015;19(3):320-6.2. Oka E, Ohtsuka Y, Yoshinaga H, Murakami N, Kobayashi K, Ogino T. Prevalence of Childhood Epilepsy and Distribution of Epileptic Syndromes: A Population-based Survey in Okayama, Japan. Epilepsia 2006;47(3):626-30.3. Beleza P. Refractory epilepsy: a clinically oriented review. Eur Neurol 2009; 62(2):65-71.4. Pentella K, Bachman D, Sandman CA. Trial of an ACTH4-9 Analogue (ORG 2766) in children with intractable seizures. Neuropediatrics 1982;13(2):59-62.5. Snead OC, Benton JW, Myers GJ. ACTH and prednisone in childhood seizure disorders. Neurology 1983;33(8):966-70.6. Okumura A, Tsuji T, Kato T, Natsume J, Negoro T, Watanabe K. ACTH therapy for generalized seizures other than spasms. Seizure 2006;15(7):469-75.7. Verhelst H, Boon P, Buyse G, Ceulemans B, D’Hooghe M, De Meirleir L, et al. Steroids in intractable childhood epilepsy: clinical experience and review of the literature. Seizure 2005;14(6):412-21.8. Oguni H, Funatsuka M, Sasaki K, Nakajima T, Yoshii K, Nishimura T, et al. Effect of ACTH therapy for epileptic spasms without hypsarrhythmia. Epilepsia 2005;46(5):709-15.9. Haberlandt E, Weger C, Sigl SB, Rauchenzauner M, Scholl-Bürgi S, Rostásy K, et al. Adrenocorticotropic hormone versus pulsatile dexamethasone in the treatment of infantile epilepsy syndromes. Pediatr Neurol 2010;42(1):21-7.10. Inutsuka M, Kobayashi K, Oka M, Hattori J, Ohtsuka Y. Treatment of epilepsy with electrical status epilepticus during slow sleep and its related disorders. Brain Dev 2006;28(5):281-6.11. Fujii A, Oguni H, Hirano Y, Osawa M. Atypical benign partial epilepsy: recognition can prevent pseudocatastrophe. Pediatr Neurol 2010;43(6):411-9.12. Inui T, Kobayashi T, Kobayashi S, Sato R, Endo W, Kikuchi A, et al. Efficacy of long term weekly ACTH therapy for intractable epilepsy. Brain Dev 2015;37(4):449-54.13. Kalra V, Sharma S, Arya R. ACTH therapy in refractory generalized epilepsy. Indian J Pediatr 2009;76(1):91-3.14. Kurian M, Korff CM. Steroids in pediatric epilepsy: infantile spasms and beyond. Epileptologie 2011; 28(1):15-20.15. Rogawski MA, DS R. Neurosteroids and infantile spasms: The deoxycorticosterone hypothesis. In: JMR PAS, editor. International Review of Neurobiology Volume 49: Academic Press; 2002. p. 199-219.16. Snead OC. How does ACTH work against infantile spasms? Bedside to bench. Ann Neurol 2001;49(3):288-9.17. Jacobson L, Sapolsky R. The Role of the Hippocampus in Feedback Regulation of the Hypothalamic-Pituitary- Adrenocortical Axis. Endocr Rev 1991;12(2):118-34.18. Sinclair DB. Prednisone therapy in pediatric epilepsy. Pediatr Neurol 2003;28(3):194-8

A Framework for Fine-Grained Synchronization of Dependent GPU Kernels

Machine Learning (ML) models contain highly-parallel computations, such as, Matrix Multiplication, Convolutions, Dropout, etc. These computations are commonly executed on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), by dividing the computation in independent processing blocks, known as tiles. Since the number of tiles are usually higher than the execution units of a GPU, tiles are executed on all execution units in waves. However, the tiles executed in the last wave can under-utilize the execution units because tiles are not always a multiple of execution units. This under-utilization can be reduced by executing multiple independent kernels concurrently on a GPU, but is not currently possible for dependent kernels. In this paper, we present cuSync, a framework to write custom fine-grained synchronization policies for dependent kernels to improve GPU utilization. cuSync synchronizes tiles instead of kernels, which allows executing tiles of multiple dependent kernels. Using cuSync we expressed several synchronization policies in a few lines of code and reduced the inference times of GPT-3 and ResNet-38 by up to 1.19x and 1.16x respectively